Seven Fallen Feathers: Chapter 4: Hurting from the Before Summary & Analysis

By 2004, it was clear even to Canadian government officials that INAC—the branch of government responsible for Indigenous and Northern Affairs—wasn’t making any progress in addressing the concerns of Canada’s First Nations communities. The NNEC, too, was facing slews of recommendations for how to handle the “profound problems” with the program. By building dedicated residences for students and tiering boarding homes into different levels based on how closely students needed to be cared for and observed, officials hoped that more casualties could be avoided. 

By the early 2000s, waves of suicide were sweeping across First Nations communities throughout Northern Ontario; children as young as 10 were killing themselves. In traditional Indigenous culture, suicide is a rare thing—but from 1986 to 2016, more than 500 suicides swept the Nishnawbe Aski Nation alone. Seventy of those were of children between the ages of 10 and 14. A lack of mental health resources to help Indigenous people of all ages grapple with mental illness, anxiety, grief, and generational trauma had led to a “crisis of immense proportions.” Between 2000 and 2011, as many students as went missing from Thunder Bay committed suicide while enrolled at Pelican Falls High School, DFC’s sister school.

One night, Norma received a call from her son, Jonathan, a student at DFC. He told her that he was having suicidal thoughts, so Norma immediately called her son’s counselor to alert him. But the counselor said that she couldn’t go over to Jonathan’s boarding house because she “ha[d] a life too.” The next morning, Norma drove to Thunder Bay, pulled Jonathan out of DFC, and brought him home, where he could go to Pelican Falls. Still, Norma suffered a wave of grief when her nephew Eric killed himself in 2005. She blamed herself for failing to see the signs.

In 2004, the Chief Coroner for Ontario discovered that 23.5 percent of the province’s Indigenous suicides were taking place in Pikangikum First Nation, sometimes called “Pik.” In the early 2000s, Pik had no clean water and no jobs. Children were huffing inhalants, and Ottawa was offering aid to foreign countries while ignoring the problems that were literally killing its own people.

Pik, surrounded by a huge boreal forest that acts as a carbon capture site for many of the Earth’s emissions, is one of the largest Ojibwe settlements in the north. It’s a very traditional place, and most children grow up speaking Ojibwe as their first language—but it is a place completely lacking life’s basic necessities. Most homes have no running water or proper sewage systems, and the reserve isn’t connected to a power grid. Pik is blighted by an epidemic of intergenerational trauma from the residential school system—and there is nowhere to go for the new generation to escape the “onslaught” of pain all around them. There are no business or restaurants, no community centers, no libraries, and no movie theaters. Young children abuse alcohol or inhalants, leading to lasting brain damage.

Nearly all high-school-age kids in Pik are sent to DFC. In September 2005, 18-year-old Curran Strang returned to DFC for a new school year. He’d been held back, and he was older than most of his classmates. But he was friendly, kind, and close with his fellow students from Pik, who all stuck together in Thunder Bay. Curran befriended James Benson, and James helped Curran adjust to city life. The two of them would sometimes face racist taunts while out in the city—but because so many of their peers had also faced threats and violence (and had their complaints dismissed by police), they’d learned to silently put up with the abuse.

By 2005, DFC had lots of plans and protocols in place to help students succeed inside the classroom—but out in the city, there were lots of resources students still struggled to find. 20 to 30 students a year left and returned to their reserves, either of their own volition or after being sent home for bad behavior. The school had protocol for dealing with students who partied too much or missed curfew too often: guidance counselors filled out occurrence reports when an infraction took place, and students had to write papers or face other disciplinary consequences that would force them to reflect on their actions. There were also night watchers on staff now—these employees were on call 24 hours a day, and at night, they drove around the streets of Thunder Bay looking for wayward kids.

Curran Strang was lonely, and he struggled in school. He began partying with a new group—and though James was worried, he couldn’t do anything to help his friend. Curran had faced occurrence reports since 2003, and he faced consequences such as being “grounded” and writing an essay about over-consumption of alcohol. Over the next two years, Curran’s file would grow to contain nearly 60 pages of occurrence reports and behavior contracts reminding Curran of his obligations as a student. Curran was always out drinking after curfew—and each time he was picked up, he faced the same consequences. In 2004, one of Curran’s counselors noted that his behavior was concerning and that she wanted to send him for a suicide assessment—but one never took place.

Curran’s downward spiral continued. The police fined him for drinking in public while underage, and his behavioral reports continued to pile up. One night, he called the school while out one night because he believed that three people were following him and a friend throughout town past curfew. The school told him that if he had been home by curfew, the incident wouldn’t have happened. Curran was in free-fall, but the system “couldn’t catch him.”

After Curran attended the funerals of two friends who’d committed suicide back home, he returned to school on September 19, 2005, and his behavior continued to decline. James saw Curran for the last time on the 22nd, when Curran asked James for money to buy alcohol. James refused. The next morning, Curran’s boarding parent Patsy Cote reported that Curran hadn’t come home the night before. He didn’t show up at school, either. Curran’s counselor Donna drove around the city looking for him, planning to file a missing persons report if she couldn’t find him by nightfall.

A boarding parent to one of Curran’s friends, Adam Peters, later testified that Adam had come home dirty and drunk on the 22nd—Adam told his boarding parent that he’d left Curran passed out by a tree near the river. The missing persons report stated that Curran was likely a “runaway.” Police did not start working Curran’s case until two full days after his disappearance—DFC students and community members, though, had already started the search. On September 26, Curran’s body was found in the McIntyre River—the coroner’s office listed his death as an accidental drowning despite finding no evidence of Curran entering the river of his own will.

The year after Curran’s death, Pik spiraled into a suicide epidemic of unprecedented proportions. Between 2006 and 2008, 16 youths between the ages of 10 and 19 committed suicide. In 2007, Pik’s only school burned down in a fire. All of the young people who died by suicide took their lives by hanging, and none of them were able to access mental health support in the months before their deaths.