Hurtful incident at Costco

When an employee at the Costco in Laval dropped a box of shoes, Kanehsata’kehró:non Kane Montour picked it up and handed it to her.

He didn’t expect this kindness to be met with mockery, but that’s how Montour felt as the employee laughed at him while pointing at his hair. “She’s like ‘what is up with your hair, oh my God,’” said Montour. “Real smug about it. She’s like ‘you’re all bald on the sides and the front but you’ve got a long hair back, how the hell did that happen?’”

Montour wears a long braid, an expression of his Kanien’kehá:ka culture. The store employee didn’t let it drop, he said, until she was informed about the significance of Montour’s hair by Kayla Nelson, Montour’s partner, who was with him at the time.

But Montour and Nelson found the worker’s apology flippant and insincere.

“It kind of made a big scene and everybody was looking at me. I’m not going to lie, it caught me off guard and I just started tearing up. I felt really hurt.”

He went into one of the aisles where he found a chair and sat down, trying to collect himself.

“I was embarrassed. It was the first time I felt embarrassed,” he said.

“I’m a grown man. I don’t cry often. I was just so flabbergasted about it, just so embarrassed, and it just caught me off guard,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was nine years old again. I’ve dealt with racism a lot in my life. It’s never easy.”

Montour and Nelson brought the issue to a store manager. While the manager apologized and offered Montour a glass of water, the couple didn’t feel the issue had been resolved and asked for a follow-up call, but they had still not heard back four days later.

“It’s Costco’s job, especially dealing with Indigenous people or people of an ethnicity, to teach their employees how to keep their mouth shut when dealing with other religions or other cultures. Would you walk up to somebody with a turban and start pulling on it and say what is that and start laughing at them?” said Montour.

The couple ended up leaving behind about $1,000 of merchandise they were going to be purchasing that day, Montour said.

Nelson told the manager that she felt the store should be training its employees not to make remarks like that and asked that the incident be documented.

“I’m mad. I was pissed,” Nelson said. “I got in the car and I started to cry with him. This is not a new thing that has happened. This is an ongoing thing. This happens quite often when we go into public,” she said, recalling one time when a woman at another store even pulled on his hair.

Nelson doesn’t understand why it’s something they continually have to deal with, she said, but she believes Quebec has a long way to go when it comes to cultural sensitivity.

“In Quebec, we find, the people are very closed-minded and racist. Plain and simple, racist. It’s unfortunate. I find in Quebec we’re behind the times,” she said.

Montour’s hair is an integral part of his identity, something sacred, and it means everything to him, he said. “It’s the same way we braid our sweet grass. Every day I brush it. There’s a lot of people, with these residential schools, they couldn’t grow their hair, they couldn’t braid their hair,” he said. “That right was taken from them.

“Myself, I grow it because I have that right, I have those freedoms these years later. But yet, to still be dealt this kind of racism or blatant disrespect - it’s mind blowing.”

The Eastern Door left a message with Costco Canada’s head office that was not returned by deadline. Upon contacting the Laval location and asking to speak to a manager, the man to whom the call was transferred said the store would not be commenting on this matter.

He would not confirm his name or title at the store or whether or not he was the manager.

“Like I said, I’m not giving you any information,” he said.

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Marcus Bankuti, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter