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Chapter 5: The Hollowness of Not Knowing
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Seven Fallen Feathers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism, Cultural Genocide, and Racism
Generational Trauma and Circular Suffering
Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks
Tradition, Prophecy, Spirituality, and Hope
Summary
Analysis
Tanya Talaga imagines a cold, snowy night in January of 2006. A group of teenagers hurried quietly through the snowy grounds of a park, their bags full of clinking bottles of alcohol. Some of the kids used tree branches to erase their own footprints behind them—they didn’t want to get busted for drinking in the International Friendship Gardens in Thunder Bay. One girl, Robyn Harper, was new to the group. She asked her friend Skye Kakegamic to make sure she got home okay if she drank too much, and Skye promised to watch out for her. Robyn, who was from Keewaywin First Nation, had just completed her first week of grade 11 at DFC. Robyn’s mother wanted her to stay closer to home at Pelican Falls, but Robyn wanted to go to school near her friend and cousin Karla, so she came to school in the big city.
This passage introduces Robyn Harper—another Indigenous teen from a remote reserve who was struggling to keep up and fit in in a new and unfamiliar city. Talaga places Robyn’s story in the context of several of the other “fallen feather” stories by highlighting the similarities in the circumstances of Robyn’s death. Like Jethro and Curran, Robyn was out late at night drinking with a group of relatively unfamiliar people. Talaga is implying here that because the NNEC and other educational authority figures in these teens’ lives were overstretched, they couldn’t do anything about the patterns the teens were falling into as they struggled in the big city.
Themes
Robyn was staying with her cousin Bryan Kakegamic. Skye, whom she knew from home, helped her learn her way around the city, navigate the bus system, and meet some new friends. On this night, Robyn and Skye had joined some other kids in pooling their money to secure some alcohol from a runner. In the park, Skye and Robyn and their friends consumed part of a 60-ounce bottle of vodka, Smirnoff Ice coolers, and six 40-ounce bottles of beer.
Robyn was close to several family members—she had more support than most. And yet even the family and community members she did have around her couldn’t watch her as closely as she needed to be watched or keep her safe from the realities of lonely city life.
Themes
When it was time to leave, Robyn took a couple of hits off a bowl of cannabis. After inhaling, she struggled to walk and began slurring her words. Skye, remembering her promise, helped Robyn leave the park, trailing behind the other kids. But Robyn was large and tall, and she could hardly move, so Skye began dragging her through the snow. When the two of them reached the road, their friends were nowhere to be seen. Robyn vomited. Skye tried to flag down a passing car, but the passengers threw food at them and, calling them “Indians,” told them to “go home.”
That Robyn and Skye faced racist taunts as they struggled to make their way home, drunk, in the late-night snow illustrates how hostile and racist an environment Thunder Bay is. It further suggests that beneath the veneer of a fun and laid-back night out, there was real danger lurking around every corner of the city—and that this lurking danger is something that all of the Indigenous students in Thunder Bay must navigate, both psychologically and practically, on a day-to-day basis.
Themes
Finally, Skye saw another member of their group, Vanessa, in the distance. Vanessa helped Skye walk the nearly unconscious Robyn to the bus. They rode together to the Brodie Street bus terminal, where they ran into another friend. As they waited for more of their group, Robyn fell to the floor. A terminal employee approached Skye and began asking what was wrong with Robyn. Skye was afraid of getting in trouble with the racist Thunder Pay police, who’d once locked Skye up overnight and taunted her the whole time. So, she insisted that everything was fine and called a counselor from the NNEC.
Skye had had a traumatic experience with the racist Thunder Bay Police in the past. So even though she might have suspected that Robyn needed more than a ride home, she called the NNEC. It’s impossible to know what Skye’s motivations were, but Talaga is using this moment to illustrate how Indigenous people must often make difficult or inadvisable choices because of the continual racism and violence they face at the hands of white Canadians. Colonialism and racism continue to define daily life for countless Indigenous Canadians—especially those who live in majority-white places like Thunder Bay—in ways that make them make perfectly logical decisions that the white power structure will then criticize them for.
Themes
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David Fox, a counselor from the NNEC, arrived and helped Robyn into his van. Cheyenne Linklater, who was Robyn’s boarding parent and an NNEC on-call member, arrived and offered Skye a ride home. They stopped at Cheyenne’s home first, where David and Cheyenne helped Robyn into the house. Then, Cheyenne took Skye home. While Skye says that this is what happened, Cheyenne denies that she was at the bus terminal or at the house with Robyn. According to her, she didn’t return home from work until 4 a.m., at which point she checked on Robyn before going up to bed. But video footage confirms that Cheyenne wasn’t telling the truth.
In spite of their best intentions, many NNEC members and boarding parents were simply unequipped to provide the level of care that many boarding students need. Robyn was deeply intoxicated—she needed medical attention. But no one around her, perhaps out of fear of involving the authorities (or being singled out for neglect), helped Robyn get the care she needed. In this sense, Robyn’s death is indeed the responsibility of the overstretched and underfunded NNEC.
Themes
It was 10:30 p.m. when David and Cheyenne brought Robyn into Cheyenne’s house and laid her on her side in the hallway. At 2 a.m., when Cheyenne’s husband (and Robyn’s cousin) Bryan, woke up for his newspaper route, he found Robyn lying on the hall floor. But she moved when he nudged her, so he left for work. When he returned home at 6:30 a.m., he went straight to bed—but as he was laying down, his brother knocked on his door to tell him that Robyn was dead.
Again, no one gave Robyn the help she needed—she slipped through the cracks of the very system that was supposed to protect her. Talaga suggests that , without dedicated resources in place to really monitor and look out for Indigenous students’ well-being, every Indigenous student who chooses to leave home and pursue their education may very well be putting their life at risk.
Themes
An ambulance was dispatched to Bryan and Cheyenne’s home on January 12, 2007, at 8:59 a.m. Robyn wasn’t breathing, and her skin was blue. Rigor mortis had already begun setting into her limbs. The coroner was busy with an emergency (coroners in this part of the province often work as physicians, too), so the police gathered all the information needed for the post-mortem. Guidelines for investigations of deaths by coroners suggest coroners respond to urgent cases within 30 minutes and follow a careful set of protocols once they do. But in Robyn’s case, the coroner’s office followed none of the guidelines or protocols in place. No one called Robyn’s mother or kept her informed about the investigation into Robyn’s death. The coroner in Robyn’s case would, years later, dismiss his inaction as part of the reality of working in the northwest.
The NNEC and Robyn’s boarding family weren’t the only people who neglected her and let her slip through the cracks. The coroner’s office simply didn’t care to make time to investigate her death—so the Thunder Bay Police, who’d many times over proven their disinterest in helping Indigenous people, reported on Robyn’s death for them. The individuals and institutions that should have been helping Robyn—and helping to secure justice for her even in death—failed her at every level.
Themes
The pathologist who performed Robyn’s autopsy described the state of her body: rigor mortis had set in, but decomposition had not begun. She had a contusion on her forehead and a mark on her cheek. She had multiple “slash-like scars” on her left forearm and round scars on her right forearm. It took three months for the toxicity report to come back—when it did, it suggested that Robyn had died of alcohol poisoning. Her death was ruled an accident. Robyn wasn’t an experienced drinker, and no one in Thunder Bay really knew her or had gotten drunk with her before; they assumed that Robyn knew what she was doing. But Robyn was binge-drinking to fit in and make friends, and she didn’t know when to stop.
The scarring on Robyn’s body was never confirmed to be evidence of self-harm or abuse, even though slash marks and cigarette burns certainly indicate that Robyn may have needed mental health support or other kinds of advocacy. Again, she slipped through the system at every level—no one was looking out for warning signs of trauma, self-harm, or abuse; no one knew her well enough to know when she’d had too much to drink; no one got her the medical help she needed; and after she died, local officials did a shoddy job of investigating her death.
Themes
No one who attended to Robyn that night, a further inquest revealed, knew that alcohol poisoning could lead to death. And a lawyer arguing on behalf of Robyn’s case years later suggested that she was a victim of homicide—if she’d gotten to a hospital, her case might not have been fatal. The lawyer held the NNEC responsible for Robyn’s death—they had the capacity to help her, but they did not.
The NNEC, though full of people with good intentions, simply didn’t have the structural support or expertise needed to help Robyn. Perhaps, with better funding and more governmental support, the NNEC would better be able to care for its students on every step of their journey and help them before it's too late.
Themes
In February of 2017, the chief coroner of Ontario sent a memo to all coroners in the province, reprimanding them for neglecting to follow protocol and reminding them of the guidelines for death investigations—and the meticulous reports that should accompany them. But two months after the memo went out, newly revised guidelines were released. The chief coroner’s office was relaxing the guidelines around death scenes, stating that timely arrival at the scene of a death was “dependent upon an Investigative Coroner’s ability to free him/herself of other activities within a reasonable period of time.”
Robyn’s death didn’t create any structural change—instead, the coroner’s office insisted that they were well within their rights to determine which deaths were most important to investigate in a timely manner. Again, this is indicative of how racist, colonialist policies continue to seep into many levels of Canadian government and public health infrastructure, almost always to the detriment of Indigenous people.
Themes
