Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World

by Naomi Klein

One person who felt changed by what he was learning was Mike Otto, a white trucker, small-business owner, and father who lives a couple of hours down Highway 97 from those first graves. Otto found himself imagining what Indigenous families must have been going through all these years, the ones who never knew what happened to “those little ones that had gone missing.” Witnessing the pain of his Indigenous neighbors, Otto decided he needed to do something to show that non-Indigenous Canadians like him stood in solidarity with their efforts to seek justice from the government, the court system, and the church. The pandemic was still raging, and the community where the graves were found had made it clear that they did not want crowds of strangers traipsing through their territory. Otto had an idea for something powerful that would respect the community’s need for physical distance: a trucker convoy, one that would pass in front of the burial grounds, make some offerings, then leave. He called it the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy. Otto posted invitations to various trucker Facebook groups and reached out to influential people in the industry. His goal was for the convoy to grow to 215 trucks; in the end, closer to 400 trucks joined up, along with many motorcycles and cars. Drivers decorated their vehicles with messages of love, hung orange shirts on their grilles, and waved EVERY CHILD MATTERS flags. The convoy was met with cheers all along the way, and in some cases whole town...