Seven Fallen Feathers

One must take a drab route, “devoid of charm,” to reach the administration office of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, or NAN—a political organization that represents 49 First Nations communities encompassing two-thirds of Ontario. Tanya Talaga travels to the ill-maintained office on a dreary day in April of 2011 to speak with NAN’s grand chief, Stan Beardy. The daughter of a half-European, half-Ojibwe mother and a Polish father, Talaga flies from Toronto to talk with Beardy about the upcoming federal election. The incumbent candidate is the Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose five-year tenure has seen the stripping of environmental protections and underfunding of Canada’s 634 First Nations.

Talaga tries to talk to Beardy about Indigenous voting statistics, pointing out that Indigenous people have the power to influence the election if they come out in large numbers. But Beardy doesn’t want to talk about voting—he wants to know why Talaga isn’t instead writing about Jordan Wabasse, a 15-year-old Indigenous boy who has been missing for 71 days. Stan tells Talaga that Jordan is the seventh student since 2000 to go missing or die while at school in Thunder Bay.

Talaga is stricken—seven is a symbolic number in Indigenous culture. The prophecy of the seven fires is important to many First Nations people: the seven “fires” represent important moments in the history of the people on “Turtle Island” (the Indigenous name for North America). The first three fires speak of times before the arrival of Europeans. The fourth fire predicts the arrival of the light-skinned race, and the fifth speaks of war and suffering at the hands of that race. The sixth fire speaks of the "mask of death” worn by white-skinned invaders and the erasure of Indigenous lives and teachings. The seventh fire speaks of young Indigenous people rising up and learning to find their own way through the “trails of the past.”

Beardy tells Talaga that all of the students who have disappeared or died were from remote communities in Northern Ontario, where there are few high schools. They’d all come to Thunder Bay to pursue an education and escape the poverty of the reservations. On reservations, food insecurity and malnutrition are rampant—so diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and dental problems plague many Indigenous people. Clean running water is a rarity. Hospitals, fire departments, and schools are few and far between. Even though Canada’s government was, until the 1990s, supposed to fund and maintain schools for Indigenous children, this promise has never really been fulfilled.

Stan Beardy takes Talaga on a drive. As they drive, he tells her about his son, Daniel, who was 19 years old when he died in 2004 after being beaten badly at a house party. Daniel was close to graduating from Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School (DFC) in Thunder Bay, a school for Indigenous students run by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC). Most of the students who attend DFC come from reserves hundreds of kilometers away and live in boarding houses with local parents. (Six of the seven students Talaga will write about in Seven Fallen Feathers attended DFC.) For Stan, the loss of these seven students represents the failure of one generation to properly look out for the next.

Stan parks the car near a bridge crossing the Kam. From that spot, Talaga can see Animikii-wajiw, or Thunder Mountain, a spiritual center for the Ojibwe of Fort William First Nation. Stan tells Talaga that he believes that Jordan was chased into the river; searchers recently found one of Jordan’s running shoes at this exact spot.

After the search for Jordan first got under way, a blind Elder of the Webequie First Nation told—the leader of the community search for Jordan in Thunder Bay that he’d had a vision. The vision was of Jordan scuffling with two young people near an industrial warehouse on the banks of the Kam on the night that he vanished. The blind man’s vision also included an image of Jordan’s body lying on the ground, his spirit on top of the river’s water. The Elder warned the search leader, “The more you search, the more he vanishes.”

Jordan Wabasse arrived in Thunder Bay in September of 2010 to attend the Matawa Learning Centre. Jordan didn’t feel he was getting a good enough education at home, so he begged his mother Bernice to send him to Thunder Bay to continue school. Jordan wanted to play hockey—and Bernice wanted to support his dreams. She sent him to Thunder Bay to board with his distant cousin, Clifford Wabasse, and Clifford’s wife, Jessica. Boarding parents were paid monthly to host students, but they were not obligated to supervise their boarders, help them with homework, or transport them to or from school and extracurriculars.

On the frigid morning of February 7, 2011, Jordan left home for school at his usual time. Jordan had been raised far away from Thunder Bay in the remote, traditional community of Webequie—and though adjusting to the city was a process, Jordan was responsible and punctual. When he didn’t come home for dinner before hockey practice that night, Jessica found it strange—and when he didn’t call his girlfriend Myda that night at 11, Myda grew worried as well.

Jordan was last seen alive getting off of a Thunder Bay Transit bus just a block away from his boarding house. He’d been at the mall—a popular hangout for northern teens like Jordan who grew up in places that didn’t have stores or restaurants, let alone a shopping mall. After visiting the mall, he’d gone drinking with a couple of friends. Some of his classmates saw him on the bus around 9:30 p.m., and the last image of Jordan on transit footage was caught at about 10.

Clifford called the Thunder Bay Police on February 8 to report Jordan missing. The Detective Constable who came to the house that night didn’t seem to realize that Jordan had already been missing for a full 24 hours. A ground search did not begin for another 48 hours—and no Amber Alert was issued, nor were any K-9 units sent out to join the search.

Six days after Jordan’s disappearance, a search team turned up a ballcap that appeared to have belonged to Jordan, as well as some nearby footprints in the snow. Police called in a dive team to plunge the depths of the icy river near where the cap had been found, but nothing turned up. Meanwhile, Indigenous communities from all over the north banded together to fundraise and lead searches.

On March 20, a team from Cat Lake First Nation found Jordan’s running shoe after following the map of the blind Elder’s vision. When the team notified police about finding the shoe—and drag marks in the snow nearby—the police dismissed the marks as “kids sliding.” The team turned up blood and teeth from a nearby site, and while these weren’t found to belong to Jordan, DNA profiling of Jordan’s mother revealed that the hat was unmistakably his.

The Indigenous search team continued to look for Jordan, combing the Kam riverbanks and passing out missing person flyers tirelessly. Rumors about Jordan’s connections to a gang called the Native Syndicate began flying. Another native boy named Jordan Waboose, who did have connections to the gang, believed that Jordan Wabasse had been killed accidentally, and that the gang was really still after him.

In early May, as spring began to arrive, boaters called police to report a body floating in the river near the swing bridge—the location that the blind Elder had seen in his visions. After 92 days, Jordan’s body was pulled from the river; it was badly decomposed, but still clothed in the hoodie and left sneaker Jordan was wearing on the day he disappeared. At 9 p.m. that night, a Thunder Bay Police sergeant went to visit Jordan’s mother at the hotel where she was staying. Dental records confirmed that the body was Jordan’s.

Three days later, police received a tip from a residence for teenagers—one of the residents heard that two men had pushed Jordan off the bridge. But the resident didn’t want to talk to the police—she fled the group home. Police followed up on the lead and tracked down the teenager, Josee, and she gave them the names of the men who’d allegedly pushed Jordan. The police interrogated the men, Austin Millar and Steven Cole, but they denied having anything to do with Jordan. Five years later, a friend of one of the men would admit in a court room that Steven confessed to pushing Jordan. Other loose ends in the case, such as the similarly-named Jordan Waboose (and an acquaintance of his named Kenny Wabasse, who shared Jordan’s last name), offered no promising leads.

To this day, Jordan’s death has no explanation. It doesn’t make sense that Jordan would’ve wound up on the swing bridge—it wasn’t on his route home. Jordan’s death was ultimately marked “Accidental,” with the cause of death listed as “cold water drowning.” But during the inquest into the deaths of the seven Indigenous students, a lawyer would say that she didn’t accept that as the cause of Jordan’s death for an instant.