Seven Fallen Feathers

A month after Robyn’s death, Cindy Blackstock—an experienced child protection professional—launched a human rights complaint against the government of Canada on behalf of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations, which represents 634 First Nations communities across Canada. The complaint alleged that the Government of Canada was racially discriminating against Indigenous children by failing to provide equitable levels of welfare funding to Indigenous families. This lack, the complaint suggested, had ripple effects throughout Indigenous children’s entire lives.

The same year, in September of 2007, the UN held a General Assembly on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people. This document called on all United Nations countries to sign a document declaring that Indigenous people had rights to equality, the right to live free from discrimination, the right to protection from acts of genocide or violence, and the right to establish and control their own educational systems. Canada, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand voted against the declaration, claiming that it went against existing protections in their own constitutions.

One night in late October of 2007, Ricki Strang suddenly gained consciousness in waist-deep water—he had no idea how he’d wound up in the river, or where his brother Reggie was. Ricki dragged himself from the water, calling for Reggie, but there was no answer. He headed back to his boarding house, drunk and wet; one of the adult boarders called the NNEC to tell them that Reggie had missed his curfew, and that Rickie was inebriated. But the report the NNEC filed was incorrect: it stated that Reggie was the one who had come home.

On November 1, less than a week after he was last seen, Reggie Bushie’s body was pulled from the McIntyre River. He was the third boy to have been pulled from a Thunder Bay river, the fifth DFC student to die since 2000, and the fifth Indigenous boy whose case was egregiously mishandled by the police. Reggie’s mother, Rhoda, wasn’t told that her son was missing until three days after his disappearance. Like the other four students, Reggie was unfamiliar with the Thunder Bay Area, a non-native speaker of English, and struggling to keep up in school. Reggie, like Robyn, wasn’t cared for or known well by the NNEC members in charge of monitoring him. Cheyenne Linklater, Robyn Harper’s boarding parent, was the one to report Reggie missing, but she didn’t get his name right—and she didn’t even know that Ricki was his brother.

Just as in the cases of Jethro Anderson and Curran Strang, police almost immediately determined that “no foul play” had been involved in Reggie’s death without conducting a thorough investigation. All three statements imply that the boys fell into the water due to inebriation. But both Reggie and Ricki were experienced swimmers, and Ricki alleged that there was no way Reggie would have allowed himself to drown, even if he was drunk.

When Ricki learned the next morning that Reggie wasn’t home, he wasn’t immediately alarmed—he assumed that Reggie was at another friend’s house. But that afternoon, when Reggie still hadn’t come home, Ricki headed out with his boarding parents to look around the city for him. When they still couldn’t find Reggie, the group contacted Cheyenne, who called the police later that night. The police brought Ricki in for questioning several times over the next few days—one day, he was questioned three separate times. Yet still the police did not notify the boys’ parents that Reggie was missing.

Ricki told police that he had a feeling his brother was in the water, since he himself had regained consciousness in the icy water. He admitted to worrying that they’d been mugged—they were wearing backpacks that night, and both backpacks were missing. Ricki took police to the underpass where he last remembered being with Reggie—they’d gone there to drink with some friends, even though they weren’t particularly big drinkers. At one point in the night, Ricki’s memory began to fade—but though he wasn’t feeling well, he stayed with his brother. At the river’s edge, as the police watched, Ricki knelt before the water and spread his arms out as if he were reaching for his brother. 

On October 29, Norma Kejick was at lunch with her NNEC colleague Lydia Big George when she got the call about Reggie’s disappearance. The two of them immediately left the restaurant and began the eight-hour drive down to Thunder Bay. The two of them joined the search effort—headquarters had been established at DFC, but there were few search parties heading out. The police were dragging the river, but they couldn’t find anything. By the next day, the community’s frustration was mounting. Norma got a group together to head down to the river in the late afternoon. There, she encountered two boys who admitted to being with Reggie the night that he went missing.

The boys told Norma that they’d been sitting around drinking lots of alcohol, and that at one point in the evening, Ricki and Reggie had broken off from the rest of the group. Norma decided that she needed to talk to Ricki, and he agreed to meet with her at DFC. When he walked into the room, he was withdrawn and sullen. But when Norma started talking about the night of Reggie’s disappearance, Ricki asked her if she’d accompany him down to the river the next day. Norma said that she would. She’d heard that Ricki had been placed on suicide watch at his boarding house—so she handed him her card and urged him to call her anytime, day or night, if he was feeling low.

The next day, Norma accompanied Ricki, an Elder, several students from the brothers’ community of Poplar Hill, and a Thunder Bay Police constable down to the river. There, a dive team was searching the river. Ricki ran down to the water’s edge, collapsed, and began to cry. Norma asked Ricki if this was the place he’d emerged from the water. Then she asked if he’d gone into the river because he was looking for his brother. Ricki nodded and pointed into the middle of the river.

That afternoon, Norma called the police to tell them that they were dredging the river in the wrong spot—they needed to be searching on the opposite shore and under a nearby bridge. Norma took the boys back to school. Later that afternoon, one of her colleagues received a call from Alvin Fiddler—the police had found Reggie’s body. Norma retrieved Ricki from the gym, where he was playing hockey with his friends, and led him down to the office. His parents, who’d finally gotten a flight to Thunder Bay from their reservation, had just arrived. They all sat together as Alvin and Chief Eli Moose arrived to tell the group that Reggie’s body had been found.

Reggie’s mother Rhoda, Alvin Fiddler, and the other members of the Poplar Hill community wanted answers. They couldn’t understand why so many students were dying, why parents weren’t being notified about students who’d gone missing, and why the police were immediately ruling out foul play as a potential cause of death. Together, Rhoda and Fiddler began calling for an inquest—not just into Reggie’s death, but the deaths of all the DFC students who’d been turning up dead. With the help of Toronto lawyer Julian Falconer—who’d successfully argued many cases on behalf of Indigenous and Black people—Reggie’s family pushed for an inquest. This began with accusations of neglect on the part of the regional supervising coroner in Thunder Bay.

In mid-June of 2008, the coroner’s office issued a press release announcing their intent to begin an inquest into Reggie’s death in January of 2009—but they neglected to mention beginning inquests into any of the other deaths. Fiddler and Rhoda were upset and worried that white Canadians were going to be in charge of making the decisions about how to save Indigenous kids.

But Falconer told them to stay strong—he was representing two other cases concerning representational juries in Indigenous trials, trying to ensure that Indigenous people were not excluded from the justice process in their own battles. These cases were important and meaningful in shifting precedents regarding First Nations people’s right to a trial by a jury of their peers. But they’d also put a halt to the inquest into the deaths of the DFC students for years.

Meanwhile, yet another student was attacked one night near the McIntyre River. On October 28, 2008, 16-year-old Darryl Kakekayash was beaten and thrown into the Neebing river. Just like Jethro, Reggie, and Curran, Darryl was an Indigenous student living far from home and attending DFC. While heading home from a movie in order to meet curfew, three white men approached him, accused him of being in the Native Syndicate, and began to beat him with their fists and wooden two-by-fours. They called him racist, derogatory names and heaved him in and out of the ice-cold river repeatedly.

After the men threw him in the river one final time and left him for dead, Darryl managed to pull himself out and drag himself along the ground toward the road. He was able to flag down an out-of-service bus and convince the driver to take him to a stop near his house. He ran straight home. The next day at school, he told the principal, Jonathan Kakegamic, what had happened. Kakaegamic urged Darryl to tell the police his story, and he relented—but it would take years for the police to follow up on Darryl’s story. Even then, they only did so in support of the larger inquest into the fates of the other DFC students. No one was ever charged for Darryl’s assault.

On May 29, 2008, the Assembly of First Nations held a National Day of Action for Indigenous People in Ottawa, and Shannen Koostachin traveled with her class to the rally to ask the government for a new school. The school on their reservation, made entirely of portables, was a replacement for an old building that had been condemned back in 1979. Shannen and her class met with the government’s Indian Affairs minister, Chuck Strahl—but it was clear that Strahl didn’t take the meeting seriously. He told the students that building a school on their reservation simply wasn’t on the government’s list of priorities.

On the steps of the Parliament building, Shannen delivered a scathing speech, reminding government officials that “school should be a time for dreams”—and that Indigenous children shouldn’t be excluded from the opportunity to dream, too. Shannen’s speech gained national media attention, and, two weeks later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public apology to the 80,000 living survivors of the residential schools. Harper admitted, on national television, that the mission of the schools had been “to kill the Indian in the child,” and that it was high time for the Canadian Government to assume responsibility for its crimes and failings.

As Alvin Fiddler watched Harper’s speech, all he could think about was the abject poverty that still defined life for the children of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation and other First Nations communities around the country. He thought about the generational trauma the schools had created and about the five dead students in Thunder Bay—they were direct casualties of the residential schools’ legacy.

On January 14, 2009, Rhoda King and her husband Berenson requested standing at the inquest into Reggie’s death. So did Julian Falconer, on behalf of NAN; and so did the NNEC, the Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth, and INAC. NAN and Rhoda King filed motions questioning the validity of the five-member jury. It was clear that Indigenous people didn’t trust the justice system—at no level did it protect their people or their interests. Thus, they didn’t participate in the jury system—and as a result, their cases were heard by white judges and tried by white juries. The Bushie family was making a stand, demanding that representational juries for Indigenous cases became the standard.