Canada developed residential schools in order to assimilate Indigenous children into white Canadian society so that the Canadian government wouldn’t have to honor the treaties they’d signed with Canada’s First Nations in the 18th and 19th centuries. These schools were notorious sites of abuse. Indigenous students were rounded up from their reservations, cut off from their communities, and placed in schools where they were forced to abandon their identities. The children were used in medical experiments; corporally punished; and sexually abused by teachers and fellow students. Author Tanya Talaga argues that the suffering the residential schools caused didn’t just affect the children forced to attend them—this emotional destruction filtered down to affect the families and descendants of these victims, and that such generational trauma can thwart communities from healing the wounds of their past as they unwittingly pass suffering on throughout the years.
Talaga examines the roots of generational trauma by looking at Canada’s history of colonialism, forced assimilation, and cultural genocide of Indigenous people. Canada’s history is deeply rooted in colonial violence,—from the 16th century onward, white French and British settlers sought to destroy Indigenous communities so that colonial society could flourish. By sequestering Indigenous people on reservations, settlers could keep Indigenous communities out of the way. To then ensure that these communities didn’t grow stronger in isolation, the colonists created residential schools in the 1800s to weaken Indigenous children’s ties to their own communities. Indigenous children were taken from their homes—often without warning—and brought to schools run by white, Christian colonists whose primary directive was to “kill the Indian within the child.” These schools were intended to force the assimilation of Indigenous children into white colonial society. By severing these children from their families, barring them from speaking their native languages, and using corporal punishment and sexual abuse to keep them in line, these schools, which operated into the mid-20th century, attempted to erase Indigenous culture.
The trauma that Indigenous children sustained while living in Canada’s residential schools defined many of their lives, as well as their relationships to future generations. Indigenous children who were forced into residential schools were traumatized—they were ripped from their families; placed in schools with children who weren’t from their cultures; and subjected to malnutrition, medical experimentation, and sexual assault. The trauma of the residential schools continues to affect people like Pearl and Daisy Wenjack, whose younger brother Chanie Wenjack died attempting to escape the physical punishment and sexual abuse at his residential school. When Pearl Wenjack heard about the “seven fallen feathers”—seven Indigenous students who died while attending school in Thunder Bay between 2000 and 2011—she felt the pain of the past “all over again.” Pearl’s response to the crisis in Thunder Bay shows that trauma is, in many ways, circular. The traumas inflicted on the older generations are passed down to the newer generation, while the traumas experienced by the new generation dredge up memories of the past for the older generation—and the suffering within Indigenous communities is amplified.
The patterns of the past continue to be inflicted on the present, in large part because that past is difficult to escape. Indigenous students who leave home today aren’t forced into residential schools. But due to lack of funding and opportunity on Indigenous reservations that is a result of those residential schools and government policies, current Indigenous students often have little choice but to go away to school and cut themselves off from their communities in the process. This is a similar cycle to the one their parents and grandparents faced as they were ripped from their families and forced into alienating, dangerous schooling situations. On top of that, students who leave home to attend school often come from traumatic environments. Because many of their parents are survivors of the residential schools themselves, many youths have spent their lives dealing with their parents’ trauma-related substance abuse and generational poverty. Dealing with these issues at such a young age, Talaga suggests, often means that these students are themselves already traumatized when they arrive at school. Even though modern Canadian schools like Dennis Franklin Cromarty were created to support Indigenous students, students who attend those boarding schools bring “the ghosts of the past with them.” In other words, it’s hard even for Indigenous students who leave home to escape the circular traumas in their families and their communities. These students frequently turn to substance abuse to numb the pain—and as they struggle with loneliness, homesickness, and the “ghosts” of the past in a new environment, they become more vulnerable to danger. The violence—and, in the cases of the “seven fallen feathers,” death—that they suffer then makes its way back to their home communities, retraumatizing their elders and creating an inescapable circle of suffering.
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Generational Trauma and Circular Suffering ThemeTracker
Generational Trauma and Circular Suffering Quotes in Seven Fallen Feathers
The Kam still draws people to its shores. Teens come down to the river's gummy banks to take cover under bridges or in bushes to drink and party. Here they have privacy, a space of their own, beside the giant pulp and paper mill that spews smelly, yellow, funnel-shaped clouds into the air. Here they are close to nature. They sit on the rocks and listen to the rush of the water, and they are reminded of home.
To understand the stories of the seven lost students who are the subjects of this book, the seven "fallen feathers," you must understand Thunder Bay's past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distaste, of a lack of cultural awareness and understanding, were planted in those early days, and how they were watered and nourished with misunderstanding and ambivalence. And you must understand how the government of Canada has historically underfunded education and health services for Indigenous children, providing consistently lower levels of support than for non-Indigenous kids, and how it continues to do so to this day. The white face of prosperity built its own society as the red face powerlessly stood and watched.
By the time of the seventh fire, young people would rise up and begin to follow the trails of the past, seeking help from the Elders, but many of the Elders would have fallen asleep or be otherwise unable to help. The young would have to find their own way, and if they were successful there would be a rebirth of the Anishinaabe nation. But if they were to fail, all would fail.
When Stan talked about losing his son, the pain of the lost seven was closely tied to him. The loss of Daniel and the loss of the seven represented the loss of hope, the failure of one generation to take care of the next.
It is vital that people understand how the utter failure and betrayal of the treaties […] worked in conjunction with a paternalistic piece of legislation called the Indian Act to isolate Indigenous people on remote reservations and to keep them subservient to Ottawa for more than one hundred years.
If every Indigenous child was absorbed into Canadian society, their ties to their language and their culture would be broken. They wouldn't live on reserve lands; they'd live and work among other Canadians and there would no longer be a need for treaties, reserves, or special rights given to Indigenous people. The single purpose, and simple truth, of the residential school system was that it was an act of cultural genocide. If the government of Canada managed to assimilate all Indigenous kids, it would no longer have any financial or legal obligations to Indigenous people.
For the next decade, the children continued to be abused at the school, but now they were far away from home. By the 1940s and 1950s, the government knew the residential school system was an absolute disaster. The Indigenous people were not seamlessly assimilating into Canadian culture and society; in fact, they were actively resisting assimilation.
Regardless, from the 1940s until 1952, Canadian scientists across the country worked with bureaucrats—who were in charge of the care of Indigenous children—and top nutrition experts on what have become notoriously known as starvation experiments using students at six residential schools as their subjects.
What the statistics don't tell you is how some of the older children would form their own abusive circles, preying on the younger, more vulnerable kids. The abuse suffered at the hands of adult supervisors took its toll on the students. They became further disengaged from the classroom, angry, and in need of someone to take their rage out on. For some of these kids, the younger children were easy victims.
This is the life Chanie ran from.
"When I am alone at home, I think about my brother. The drive to go home was so strong. I don’t want his death to be in vain[.] […] As a residential school survivor, you can feel it all over again, what these students felt. Yes, you can feel it."
Parents sent their children to DFC by choice. It is not a residential school. It is not run by the church, nor is it strictly regulated by Indigenous and Northern Affairs. It is an Indigenous-run private school. But the only other choice parents had was to abandon their children's high school education or pick up and move to a city.
The one problem the educators couldn’t foresee was that every single one of those children brought the ghosts of the past with them. Some of the kids were leaving an idyllic family life, but most were not. Many came from homes touched by the horrific trauma of residential school—abuse, addictions, extreme poverty, and confused minds.
Dora remembers looking at Jethro and thinking that he didn't look as bad as the director had made out. But when she looked more closely, she saw a three-inch-wide gash, starting from the top of his forehead and ending at the middle of his head. There were round contusions on his cheek. She immediately thought it looked like someone had extinguished their burning cigarette butts on his face.
She checked his tummy. It wasn't bloated. She looked at his hands, which weren't purple or blown up with water.
Dora took in a sharp breath. She knew she was right: This was no accident.
Intergenerational trauma from the residential school experience is entrenched in Pikangikum. One hundred years of social exclusion, racism, and colonialism has manifested as addiction, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and lack of knowledge on how to parent a child. Few of the kids discuss the sexual abuse they've suffered, yet more than 80 percent of the children and youth in Indigenous residential treatment centres come from homes where they were sexually abused.
An undercurrent of racism runs through Thunder Bay society. It can be subtle and insidious but it can also be in your face. Ask any Indigenous high school students in Thunder Bay if they have experienced racism and they'll undoubtedly tell you about racial slurs and garbage or rotten eggs being thrown at them from passing cars. Others have been hit on the back of the head with beer bottles by unknown groups of assailants, who leave them bleeding on the side of the road.
Maryanne is left wondering what happened to Paul, just like she has been left wondering what happened to Sarah. Maryanne has had to live with the crushing emptiness of having two of the most important people in her life taken from her without any explanation why. Living in this state makes it nearly impossible for Maryanne to find peace; she is constantly looking for answers. And after she has exhausted all possibilities, she is left hollow.
Alvin thought about the abject poverty most of his people lived in and the addictions they suffered in the hopes of making all their misery go away.
Alvin thought about their parents, even his own older brothers and sisters, who had gone to residential school before his family moved to Muskrat Dam. And he thought about the forced schooling of more than 150,000 Indigenous kids and what it had done to the psyche of the people and the impact it had had on the next generation and the next.
And then he thought about the five dead students there in Thunder Bay. A direct line of causation could be drawn from the residential school legacy to the failings in the government-run education system his people were left with.
And yet still the inequities rage. Northern First Nations families are faced with the horrific choice of either sending their children to high school in a community that cannot guarantee their safety, or keeping them at home and hoping distance education will be enough. Families are still being told—more than twenty years after the last residential school was shut down—that they must surrender their children for them to gain an education. Handing over the reins to Indigenous education authorities such as the NNEC without giving them the proper funding tools is another form of colonial control and racism.
The court system had assigned one of the largest, most complex inquests in Ontario’s history to one of the smallest rooms in the building. […] The room allocation was […] a slap in the face to the parents who had waited years for the formal investigation into their children’s deaths to begin.
Outraged and insulted, Achneepineskum, Falconer, and NAN staff began moving chairs from other courtrooms and the lobby and jamming them into the tiny box they were allocated.
To the families, this scheduling gaffe was indicative of how the cases of the seven students were handled by authorities from the very start. Real life became a metaphor for how they had always been treated […] by the Canadian justice system.
[Christian] called the painting Seven Fallen Feathers. Each feather represents one of the seven dead students. Morrisseau was tired of hearing them being called that, "Seven dead students." People always referred to the kids like that. "The seven dead." As if they weren't anything else in life.
They had their own spirits. They were their own people.
Morrisseau couldn’t stand hearing his son Kyle being called "one of the seven dead students" anymore, not by the news media, not by the lawyers, not by the people who meant well but found it easier to lump them all together as one.
Kyle was a fallen feather. They all were.
The Canada Day holiday approaches and the country prepares to celebrate its 150th birthday on July 1; for Alvin it will be a day of reflection. He will be at a powwow […] with his family. He will be standing in a circle with all the nations surrounding him in ceremonial dance, and he will be thinking of the children before him decked out in their beautiful jingle dresses, their bright-coloured ribbons, and their feathers, and he will wonder about their future and what he can do to make sure they make it to the final prophecy—the eighth fire. Can the settlers and the Indigenous people come together as one and move forward in harmony?
