In Seven Fallen Feathers, Ojibwe author and journalist Tanya Talaga reports on the deaths of seven Indigenous Canadian high school students who traveled to Thunder Bay, Ontario to attend boarding school in the city. The seven students, who died between 2000 and 2011, were from remote First Nations reserves. Five of them were found in the city’s rivers, and many had bruises and burns on their bodies that could indicate foul play. Yet the deaths received scant media coverage, and the Thunder Bay Police insisted that in each of the seven cases, “no foul play” was involved.
Talaga roots the 21st-century tragedies in Canada’s long history of colonialism and cultural genocide. French and English settlers colonized Canada from the 15th century onward. But in 1876, with the passage of the Indian Act, the Canadian government enforced laws meant to sequester Indigenous adults on their reservations while forcing Indigenous children 16 and under to attend one of the country’s 139 residential schools. The schools were created to assimilate Indigenous children into white Canadian culture—but the schools were hotbeds of violence, physical abuse, sexual assault, malnutrition, disease, and even forced medical experimentation. The 150,000 survivors of the residential school system were forever traumatized by their experiences in the schools—and, Talaga asserts, the generational trauma created up until the schools’ closures in the 1970s still affects Indigenous communities in the present day. Alcoholism, cycles of abuse, and the government’s punitive lack of funding for Indigenous communities has left hundreds of thousands of people traumatized and isolated.
Because there are few resources on Indigenous reserves, many Indigenous children who want to pursue educations are forced to travel to cities like Thunder Bay to enroll in schools. The Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (or NNEC) was established in the 1970s to give Indigenous people a greater say in their children’s educations. In 1999, the NNEC received a government grant to open up a new school for Indigenous students on the site of an old residential school in Thunder Bay. They hoped that having a dedicated place where Indigenous students could go to experience city life, learn, and grow would be a fresh start for many. Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School (DFC) opened its doors in 2000—but within weeks of its opening, grade nine student Jethro Anderson was found dead in the city’s Kaministiquia (Kam) River. The police immediately stated that foul play wasn’t suspected—but at the funeral home, Jethro’s relatives discovered suspicious bruises on his body and what appeared to be cigarette burns on his face.
In September of 2005, Curran Strang—a student who’d struggled with alcohol abuse and suicidal thoughts—was found in the McIntyre River. Again, police immediately alleged that the cause of death was accidental drowning. In 2006, Paul Panacheese collapsed suddenly and died immediately on his mother’s kitchen floor in Thunder Bay. She’d recently moved there to be closer to him after he admitted to struggling with school, friends, and peer pressure to experiment with drugs and alcohol. To this day, no explanation for Paul’s death has ever been found. A few months later, in January of 2006, Robyn Harper was brought home by NNEC officials after a night of heavy drinking with friends. Her boarding family found her dead in the morning—the cause of death was acute alcohol poisoning. Had Robyn’s friends or the NNEC taken her to a hospital, she might have lived.
In October of 2007, brothers Ricki Strang and Reggie Bushie were out drinking with friends when Ricki lost consciousness. When he regained his senses, he was in the ice-cold McIntyre River—and his brother was nowhere to be found. Less than a week later, Reggie Bushie’s body was pulled from the river. Again, police immediately insisted that no foul play was involved—even though Ricki insisted that the two of them were experienced swimmers, so Reggie wouldn’t have drowned on his own. A couple of years later, in 2009, the body of Kyle Morrisseau—the grandson of Norval Morrisseau, a famed Ojibwe painter and a survivor of the residential schools—was pulled from the McIntyre River. Police determined that Kyle had died of drowning, perhaps fueled by inebriation. In 2011, Jordan Wabasse became the seventh student to die, and the fifth to be recovered from one of the city’s rivers.
In May of 2012, Julian Falconer—a prominent Canadian lawyer—demanded that the coroner’s office conduct an inquest into the seven deaths on behalf of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation. The inquest was heavily stalled; it finally began in October of 2015 and lasted until June of 2016. Ultimately, the jury released a list of 145 recommendations as to how the Government of Canada could begin to repair relations with the Indigenous communities across the country, provide better funding for reserves, reform the Thunder Bay Police’s apathy toward Indigenous deaths, and build a more supportive, watchful education system. But to date, few of those recommendations have been carried out.
In 2017, two more dead teenagers—Tammy Keeash and Josiah Begg—were pulled from different parts of the McIntyre River within two weeks of each other. While small steps continue to be made—Thunder Bay Police now patrols the waterways more carefully at night—Indigenous leaders and community members still struggle to secure funding, attention, and support for housing projects and safety initiatives that could save the lives of young, vulnerable students.
