Greg Chomut (BA/BEd'08) Wakes the Giant

“I didn’t fall in love with teaching until I started doing it. Now it’s an integral part of who I am,” says Greg Chomut, who teaches history, art, and media at Thunder Bay’s Dennis Franklin Cromarty (DFC) High School.

The school is administered by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council and the students come from 24 Indigenous communities in Northwestern Ontario.

“It’s a big sacrifice to leave everything you know at the age of 13 or 14 and live in a stranger’s house,” Greg says. “Because of that, they deserve the best – the best school, the best learning equipment, the best textbooks.”

The best, unfortunately, is often elusive for these youngsters.

“As a non-Indigenous person, I was unaware of a lot of the racism in Thunder Bay until I started teaching at Dennis Franklin Cromarty,” he says. “But students were always telling me about their experiences being followed at retail stores by security guards or being suspected of doing something wrong wherever they went.”

People yelling racial slurs is also depressingly common. 

“I knew that there were good people and organizations in Thunder Bay, but my students weren’t connecting with them.” 

This prompted Greg, and his fellow DFC teachers Sean Spenrath and Angus Haapa, to create Wake the Giant in 2019 – an orientation for grade 7 and 8 students planning to attend high school in Thunder Bay.

Soon, Wake the Giant stickers were going up in the windows of local businesses to show their support for Indigenous people.

“The students were really excited about the stickers,” Greg says. “They’ve told me that when they see them, they know that people care about them.”

Wake the Giant officially launched with a day of workshops for the students, followed by an Amazing Race-style event in which students used city buses to navigate around town and discover different services and cultural and recreational opportunities available to them.

On the closing day, Greg and his colleagues organized a music festival for the entire city of Thunder Bay in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians – including DFC students – performed on stage at Marina Park.  The success of Wake the Giant led to the decision to make it an annual event, and they just hosted the 2021 festival this September (COVID-19 forced the postponement of the 2020 festival). 

Greg, who is a guitarist and the lead singer of the band Luke Warm and the Cold Ones, has also found other ways to incorporate music into the curriculum.

Photo right:  “Dennis Franklin Cromarty is the students’ whole life when they’re here,” Greg says. “Most schools empty out when the bell rings, but at our school, the kids are here until eight o’clock at night. There are activities going on in every room, for example, I coach cross country running and coordinate the art club.”

“A couple of years ago, we wrote a song with some of Canada’s biggest musicians – the bands July Talk and Broken Social Scene and Indigenous musicians Ansley Simpson, Cris Derksen, and Nick Ferrio. We recorded Mourning Keeps Coming Back at a Toronto studio that’s available on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming sites.”

As their musical journey progressed, Greg saw some amazing transformations in the students.

“The three girls singing backup melodies were so self-conscious that the lights in the recording studio had to be turned off and everyone had to leave the room. They held hands and sang so quietly. Fast forward two years, and they’re belting out the song to 4,000 people – there wasn’t a dry eye in the audience.” 

In recognition of Greg’s inspirational teaching, he received a 2020 Certificate of Achievement from the Prime Minister’s Awards for Teaching Excellence program.

But Greg thinks that all of us can change things for the better.

“Take some time to learn about the history of First Nations people and take a stand against racism.”

Visit wakethegiant.ca to find out how you can make Thunder Bay a more welcoming place.