Searching for Ontario’s missing Black boys

When the guns fell silent, a man lay dead. Another man riddled with bullets escaped with his life. Two teens fled, but in the small northern Ontario community, they really had nowhere to go.

Ginoogaming First Nation, a remote community of 200 people living in 90 homes, is not the kind of place that usually makes headlines. It is a 68-square-kilometre Anishnawbe reserve, tucked just south of the TransCanada Highway and next door to the tiny lakeside town of Longlac.

Details of the shooting are still foggy. The Ontario Provincial Police and the local Anishinabek Police Service are not discussing the particulars. The community and the survivor say it was about drug trafficking. But when police arrested the teens — two Black youth from Brampton, Ont., one aged 15, the other 18 — what happened took on a sharper focus.

Parents, activists and police all say that for years Black teenagers, sometimes as young as 13, have been going missing in the GTA. But they are not runaways. These boys have been groomed and lured into drug trafficking gangs with promises of money and status.

For activists raising the alarm about the issue, the answer is clear — these boys are being trafficked as criminal labour. But police say it is not that simple, and laying a trafficking charge requires the boys who end up selling drugs out of town, or "OT," to testify against their gang leaders — something they rarely do.