Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Seven Fallen Feathers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism, Cultural Genocide, and Racism
Generational Trauma and Circular Suffering
Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks
Tradition, Prophecy, Spirituality, and Hope
Summary
Analysis
In 1996, Canada’s last residential school was finally shut down—over 150,000 children had passed through them, passing down the horrors of their experiences to the next generation. Now, Indigenous families who wanted to send their children to schools had to turn to provincially run schools in urban areas like Thunder Bay. In 1979, as Indigenous people began to demand a greater say in their children’s educations, the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC) was established to run boarding programs and act as an education authority.
It took many decades, but Indigenous people finally managed to secure greater control over their children’s educations in the last gasps of the 20th century. But the trauma of the residential schools couldn’t be ignored—and as Indigenous authorities like the NNEC began working to reform how Indigenous children learned, they’d have to reckon with the very real residual traumas that grew out of generations of abuse.
Themes
The NNEC started a distance education program, since dropout rates were still high. Through this initiative, students could go to local buildings and essentially “call in” to lectures at schools that were far away. Norma Kejick was one of the first people on the NNEC board, and she was determined to create a real high school for kids in her community. The NNEC received a government grant to open up a new school on the site of an old residential school. There would be a boarding program for nearly 200 students, but over 300 applied to attend. So, the NNEC bid on a satellite building in Thunder Bay—and after winning the bid, they began work on Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, or DFC.
The NNEC was working hard to innovate new ways for Indigenous students to learn while still remaining connected to their homes and communities. But they also wanted to try to heal the wounds of the past by creating something new altogether: an all-Indigenous school that would actually work to make sure Indigenous students prospered as they left home to pursue their educations. The NNEC’s intentions in establishing DFC were noble and pure.
Themes
The old building needed many repairs, and the NNEC needed to find prospective boarding parents in the Thunder Bay area. They wanted to make sure that the students coming to the city—many of them from remote reservations—would be well-equipped to thrive in their new environment. DFC was far away, and it presented many challenges for students adjusting to city life. But since local schools for Indigenous students are egregiously underfunded and ill-maintained due to the lack of education standards in the Indian Act, DFC became a beacon of hope for many students who wanted to learn.
Again, this passage shows the NNEC’s high hopes for DFC. They wanted it to be a place of refuge for Indigenous students—a place where Indigenous youths wouldn’t have to give up their cultural identities in order to pursue their educations. But this passage also foreshadows many of the difficulties that students traveling to DFC, the NNEC, and the network of boarding parents in Thunder Bay would soon face.
Themes
Though the school was Indigenous-run and staffed with Indigenous teachers, nurses, and Elders on-site each day, the children who came to DFC “brought the ghosts of the past with them.” The traumas of the residential schools created the fractured environments these kids grew up in. The teenagers often came from poverty and had never lived in a city before. Homesickness, lack of supervision, and boredom meant that lots of students reverted to partying and drinking. The staff knew the challenges their students were facing, and they were all on-call 24 hours a day—but within the first month of DFC’s opening in October of 2000, a student would be dead.
Here, the book outlines some of the practical effects of generational trauma and circular suffering. Fractured home environments on Indigenous reserves often stemmed from the traumas older Indigenous people had endured throughout their own schooling within the residential school system. So a whole generation of people’s lives had been marked by abuse and suffering—and that generation passed on those traumas to their children. While DFC staff recognized these issues, it is clear that they did not understand the full extent of them—and so while the NNEC did their best to prepare support networks for these students, they simply didn’t have the resources to do what was needed.
Themes
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Ninth-grade DFC student Jethro Anderson, from Kasabonika Lake First Nation, was on his own away from home for the first time. Shawon Wavy, Jethro’s closest friend, partied with Jethro on October 28—the last night he was seen alive. They were down by the docks of the Kam, and Jethro was arguing with some girls. That day, Jethro’s mother, Stella, had seen a wolf outside her home on the reservation. A wolf, she knew, always brought a message with it; days later, she would find out that her first-born son was missing.
No one knows how Jethro Anderson disappeared. But this passage relays several significant facts about his disappearance. He was drinking with friends near the Kam River—a symbol of how Indigenous students who travel far away from home for their educations still seek cultural connection to their past, and of how they are often swallowed up by the system. And his mother having seen a wolf—a traditional harbinger of news in Indigenous culture—underscores the role of prophecy and traditional wisdom in Jethro’s culture. In other words, Jethro’s disappearance seemed to be fraught with meaning. He was the first DFC student to disappear—and he disappeared just weeks after the school opened its doors. His disappearance, then, seemed to foreshadow the many other casualties to come in the next few years.
Themes
Dora Morris, Jethro’s aunt and boarding parent, was concerned when he didn’t come home—he never missed curfew. Dora had known Jethro all his life, and she treated the gentle boy like he was one of her own children. The last time Dora saw Jethro, he and his cousin Nathan (Dora’s son) were on their way to the mall. When she got home from work that night and Jethro wasn’t there, she was puzzled. Jethro had disappeared for a couple of days years ago with a girlfriend, but since then, he’d adhered to curfew carefully. Nathan confessed that they’d gone to drink instead of going to the mall, employing a “runner” to buy them booze.
Indigenous teens get up to the same shenanigans as their white Canadian counterparts—but because of Canada’s history of racism and cultural genocide, Indigenous teens are unfortunately always more vulnerable. So when Dora realized that Jethro wasn’t accounted for, her concern was valid. She knew the kinds of terrible things that could happen to a vulnerable Indigenous boy out on his own in a new city.
Themes
Dora and her husband, Tom, went out to drive around and look for Jethro. When they couldn’t find him, they went home and called the police. The officer who answered retorted that Jethro was probably out partying “like every other Native kid” before hanging up on Dora. Dora called Stella, then the police again—but they said that it was too early to file a missing persons report.
The Thunder Bay Police immediately dismissed Dora’s concerns about Jethro. They invoked harmful stereotypes about Indigenous people and alcoholism, and they refused to even entertain the idea that something bad could have happened to Jethro. Their disinterest in helping an Indigenous youth speaks to the deep racism that defines how white Canadians see Indigenous people, and the structural ramifications of racism as well. It also shows how Canada’s colonialist and racist legacy toward Indigenous people not only continues to affect Indigenous people, but also continues to affect how white people and government institutions treat Indigenous people as well.
Themes
In the morning, Dora and Tom looked for Jethro near the Kam, where they learned he’d been out drinking—but there was no sign of him or anyone else. Dora went home and called the police again—and again, they told her that he’d be home later, “when the party was over.” That night, as soon as the mandated 24 hours had passed, Dora went to the station and filed a missing persons report. On Monday, Dora went to DFC and reported that Jethro was gone; the school, too, told her that Jethro was probably with friends and that he’d be home soon. But by Tuesday, he still wasn’t home, and Dora was still searching for Jethro on her own.
This passage shows that not only were the Thunder Bay Police neglectful when it came to Jethro’s case—the staff at DFC were, too. While the Indigenous staff at DFC obviously weren’t motivated by racism in the way that the police were, their response was still telling. The support networks in place to oversee the well-being of Indigenous teens in places like Thunder Bay simply weren’t sufficient. Teachers and staff were stretched thin, and they had no resources to devote to a single wayward student.
Themes
Stella arrived in Thunder Bay to join a team of volunteers searching for Jethro—Alvin Fiddler and his wife, Tesa, were among the team assembled to comb the banks of the Kam. The police didn’t start an investigation until six days after Jethro’s disappearance, and they didn’t put a notice in the media until a week after he vanished. Every time Dora called the police to check on any leads, she was dismissed or told that Jethro was “out there partying.”
In the absence of real, invested help from the Thunder Bay Police, Indigenous people from Jethro’s community and the Thunder Bay area came together to look for Jethro themselves. This shows how Indigenous people often react to miscarriages of justice not with bitterness or retribution, but instead with meaningful collective action in order to protect one another.
Themes
A week after Jethro’s disappearance, Dora was called to DFC because police had found a pair of boots by the river. The boots weren’t Jethro’s, and Dora hoped that meant that Jethro was still alive somewhere. But a week later, she got another call—this time, police had found a black cap. The cap was Jethro’s—and Dora, hysterical, became determined to get the police to start dragging the river. She could not shake the feeling that Jethro was in the water. Each day, she went down to the Kam to search the banks and cast out fishing lines—and on November 10, a police team finally began dredging the river themselves. Their searches turned up nothing, but Dora begged them to keep going. The following day, Jethro’s body was recovered from the river.
Dora’s (justified) hysteria over the Thunder Bay Police’s refusal to dredge the river can be read both literally and symbolically. On a literal level, she was enraged and grieving over the majority-white police force’s lukewarm response to Jethro’s disappearance, and she wanted them to search every available avenue until Jethro was found. But on a symbolic level, Dora’s grief runs much deeper. She knew that Jethro had been lost to a system that didn’t have the resources to support him—and that his story was being swallowed up more and more with each passing day.
Themes
Dora never received a call from the Thunder Bay Police informing her that the body was found. Instead, she learned of the discovery from a press release. The press release stated that “foul play [was] not suspected.” Dora was livid—Jethro had always been afraid of water, and she knew that there was no way he’d jumped in of his own accord. Dora drove to the funeral home as soon as the body was released there and demanded to see it. Eventually, the funeral director relented. Dora saw a huge gash on the top of Jethro’s forehead, and round contusions (like cigarette burns) on his face. Dora knew for sure that Jethro’s death hadn’t been an accident.
This passage continues to show the Thunder Bay Police’s gross mishandling of Jethro’s disappearance and death. By immediately ruling out foul play, the police raised Jethro’s family and community member’s suspicions—and what Dora discovered when she looked at Jethro’s body seemed to confirm that the police were actively trying to ignore the facts in front of them. Whether they were covering something up or whether they simply didn’t care to invest time and money in investigating the death of an Indigenous boy, one thing became clear: racism, colonialism, and the echoes of cultural genocide were still the basis of relations between white Canadians and Indigenous people, and always in ways that harmed the Indigenous people.
Themes
Two years later, Jethro’s cousin Nathan was drinking at a bar when a man began loudly talking about what he’d done to Jethro. The man apologized to Nathan for “kill[ing]” his cousin. Nathan didn’t tell the police about the encounter until 10 years later—when asked why he withheld the information, he explained that he had no faith in the Thunder Bay Police.
Nathan’s response to the bar patron’s apparent confession shows how generational trauma and circular suffering sustain themselves in insidious ways. Nathan was so traumatized by the police’s initial disinterest in Jethro’s death that he didn’t even bother to go to them with new information—he didn’t want to retraumatize himself, so he did nothing.
Themes
Teachers and staff at DFC were stunned that a student had gone missing within a month of the school’s opening. But in hindsight, Norma Kejick now sees how “naïve” she and her fellow educators were. A report released in 2001 suggested that the school become a place for grades 11 and 12 only. A Ministry of Education supervisory officer concluded that younger students were ill-equipped for the pressures of life in a city. The issues that they faced as a result—isolation, drug and alcohol abuse, and more—needed to be “nipped in the bud.”
Norma and the NNEC had the best of intentions for Indigenous students who came to Thunder Bay to pursue an education. But they were beginning to realize that perhaps plunging students from remote areas—many with backgrounds tinged by generational trauma, abuse, and poverty—into life in a bustling, majority-white city was more dangerous than they ever anticipated.
Themes
