Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, seven Indigenous Canadian youths (the titular “seven fallen feathers”) died while attending Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario. These youths became boarding school students Dennis Franklin Cromarty in order to try to pursue an education and improve their future prospects. But in going to the school, these children were cut off from their homes and families. Between feeling homesick, being removed from their cultures, and experiencing a “hostile” environment of racism from Thunder Bay’s majority-white population, these youths found themselves struggling. Counselors, teachers, and boarding parents could not keep up with the students’ needs—and government funding did not offer financial or social support for the adults tasked with helping these children make a difficult transition. Tanya Talaga argues that until Indigenous youths are given adequate funding for their educations, as well as social and emotional support networks, Indigenous children and their parents will be forced to make a devastating choice between the pursuit of education and personal safety.
Underfunded, overburdened institutions and authority figures struggle to support Indigenous youths who come to unfamiliar cities to pursue their educations. In 1979, Indigenous leaders formed the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council, or the NNEC, to act as an education authority and to run boarding programs for Indigenous students traveling to Canadian cities to pursue their educations. The NNEC’s goal was to create new learning opportunities (in the form of all-Indigenous high schools like Dennis Franklin Cromarty) and to provide support networks for the students who’d attend them. By matching Indigenous students with Indigenous boarding “parents,” bringing Elders into schools to offer guidance, and creating patrols that would drive the streets looking for any students who were lost, cold, intoxicated, or just in need of a ride home, the NNEC hoped to head off problems with homesickness, isolation, and substance abuse that they predicted students could face in the big city. But boarding parents who worked with the NNEC were often overstretched: they had their own families and jobs, and they weren’t required to monitor their boarders’ curfews or grades. Many of them simply couldn’t handle the load. Because of a lack of funding, the NNEC couldn’t pay these individuals enough to help them help their boarders. Due to restrictions on education funding held over from Canada’s racist and outdated 19th-century Indian Act, the NNEC simply couldn’t cover all their bases. Indigenous students began slipping through the cracks, struggling with alcohol abuse and poor grades. Some of them had to be sent home, unable to cope with city life—and others, like the “seven fallen feathers,” became victims of a system that couldn’t protect them in spite of its best efforts.
Talaga doesn’t lay blame with the NNEC members, teachers, and boarding parents who can’t “catch” struggling students as they descend into downward spirals. But she does suggest that more funding and supervision is needed to prevent student deaths. Through the case of Robyn Harper, an Indigenous girl who died of alcohol poisoning after a night out drinking with friends, Talaga shows how inadequate supervision, education, and financial support for students and boarding parents can result in tragedy. When Robyn’s friend Skye Kakegamic realized that Robyn was in trouble, she reached out to the NNEC—not the racist Thunder Bay Police. The NNEC responded to Skye’s call for help, sending NNEC members Cheyenne Linklater—Robyn’s boarding parent—and David Fox to the bus station where the girls were waiting. No one involved in helping Robyn, though, fully understood what alcohol poisoning was, what the telltale signs were, or that it could be fatal. And no one really knew Robyn—she was new in town—so everyone assumed that she knew what she was doing when she decided to drink so much that night. But Robyn wasn’t an experienced drinker—she likely didn’t know that the alcohol would affect her so intensely. So, Cheyenne and David took Robyn home and laid her in the hallway to sleep it off. By morning, she was dead. Essentially, Robyn died because of the NNEC’s neglect. But Talaga suggests that if there were more funding and a more robust support network for the NNEC members and students who have left home for the first time, there might be more effective policies in place for dealing with situations like Robyn’s. In Talaga’s words, “all the policies in the world do not help if the proper funding and infrastructure are not fully in place.” More government funding could be used to train boarding parents and NNEC members to deal with dangerous situations, to provide medical attention when needed, and to form deeper relationships with the students they’re looking out for.
Until the Canadian government allocates more resources to Indigenous education, Talaga suggests, Indigenous parents will be forced to make the choice between sending their children to dangerous environments, or not investing in their educations at all. Opportunities for a quality education on Indigenous reservations are few and far between—because of racist policies and treaties formed decades or centuries ago, there’s very little funding for Indigenous schools. So Indigenous parents who want better lives for their children are essentially forced to send their students away to bigger cities to attend school, just as Indigenous parents in the past were forced to send their children to residential schools. The authority figures who work with the NNEC often have the best of intentions: they want to be involved in the education of a new generation, look out for vulnerable kids, and help Indigenous communities thrive within large, majority-white cities. But in Seven Fallen Feathers, Talaga asserts that these goals simply can’t be accomplished without the help of government funding and support. And the lack of such resources is just a continuation of the racist treatment of Indigenous people that has characterized the white-dominated power structures of Canada for centuries.
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Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks ThemeTracker
Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks Quotes in Seven Fallen Feathers
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.
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.
"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.
Police did not start a missing persons investigation until six days after Jethro's disappearance.
Dora continued to call the police to check on any leads, and each time she was treated like a nuisance. "Right away, every time I called there, I got used to somebody answering the phone and hearing, 'There are no leads,' or other comments like, 'He is just out there partying.’”
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.
Curran Strang's body was found in the Mclntyre River on September 26, 2005. The Ontario Coroner's Office officially listed his death as accidental, having determined the cause of death was by drowning. Authorities believe he decided to head into the water, alone, on a cold September night. Just like Jethro Anderson, who was afraid of the water.
There is absolutely no evidence that either Jethro or Curran ended up in the river of their own accord.
At the inquest, […] the lawyer for six of the seven families bluntly stated Robyn's death was no accident—he called it a homicide. […] Homicide, in a coroner's inquest, does not require proof of intention—it is simply the killing of a human being due to the act or omission of another. […] [The lawyer] stated categorically: "We hold NNEC responsible for what happened to Robyn. There is no question the NNEC is trying its best, and there's not a lot of money, but they did have services they held out to be capable and competent and they were neither.""
When he got to the river's edge, Ricki carefully squatted down, resting on his heels. He spent some time thinking before he slowly stretched his arms out over the water, his palms gently skimming the surface. Then he put his hands in the river, his arms spread out as far as possible. His body began to shudder.
It was as if he were reaching out for his brother.
The police were touched into silence. They backed away, giving the boy the time he needed before taking him back to the station.
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.
After the attack on Darryl Kakekayash, Alvin and Julian saw a clear and disturbing pattern. They could not help but wonder if First Nations kids were being targeted and murdered. It was extremely rare to hear of Indigenous kids drowning on their reserves. Most First Nations people were born and raised on the water. Equally perplexing was how quickly the Thunder Bay Police wrote off investigations into the deaths. For Jethro, Curran, Reggie, and Kyle, police had issued press releases that came to the same conclusion: foul play was not suspected. Each of the deaths was classified as accidental: death by drinking too much and then drowning. To Thunder Bay Police, no one was readily responsible for the deaths of the students.
