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Chapter 6: We Speak for the Dead to Protect the Living
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
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.
At last, with Blackstock’s complaint, someone was taking major legal action to bring awareness to the systemic neglect of Indigenous children on the part of the Canadian government. The history of relations between white Canadians and Indigenous people is marked by racism and violence—but many people, especially those in Canada’s government, might have preferred to pretend those things were in the past. However, in reality, Blackstock argued, colonial violence and cultural genocide were phenomena that still affected Indigenous children throughout their lives.
Themes
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.
This passage shows that Canada is not the only country that has a problem admitting to the enduring effects of its history of colonial violence. Colonialism and cultural genocide continue to motivate structural racism in places all over the world, creating patterns of generational trauma and circular suffering in Indigenous communities across the globe.
Themes
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.
Again, this passage illustrates how oversights and miscommunications within the NNEC reveal structural failures within the organization. The NNEC simply can’t do everything itself—but with even people like Cindy Blackstock struggling to secure wider government recognition of how racism affects Indigenous youths, it’s nearly impossible for the NNEC to secure the funding and support it needs to adequately care for all the Indigenous teens it’s responsible for.
Themes
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.
Reggie’s death was, staggeringly, the third in which a young Indigenous boy drowned in one of Thunder Bay’s rivers. A clear pattern had emerged: vulnerable Indigenous youths who turned to substance abuse to cope with stress and trauma were turning up dead, literally and symbolically swallowed by systems that couldn’t support their needs.
Themes
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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.
The Indigenous youths’ deaths weren’t just tragic—they were starting to look suspicious. In all three cases the Thunder Bay Police—an organization with a history of racism and cruelty toward Indigenous people—immediately ruled out foul play. Even though Reggie was an experienced swimmer and even though Jethro Anderson’s body was covered in contusions and burns, police simply wouldn’t even consider investigating the idea that these boys were being killed.
Themes
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.
The Thunder Bay Police seem to have questioned Ricki multiple times, retraumatizing him over and over again, while overlooking fundamental steps in their investigation—like compassionately notifying the missing child’s parents. This is evidence of structural racism and indeed a new form of colonialist violence in action.
Themes
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.
Even though Ricki told the police that he suspected something bad had happened to him and to Reggie—and though he pointed out the spot where he seemed to believe Reggie might be in the river—the police did not take Ricki’s statements seriously. Again, the clear implication is that the police were neglecting Reggie’s disappearance because he was Indigenous. In the absence of any support from the police, this passage shows, Ricki began turning to his culture and his spirituality for answers and for comfort, reaching out to the river to try to commune with his brother.
Themes
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.
Here, Talaga shows how members of the NNEC do genuinely care about the students they’re charged with protecting—and how painful it is for them when these children slip through the cracks. Meanwhile, the Thunder Bay Police’s response to Reggie’s disappearance was, as in the cases of Jethro and Curran, lukewarm at best. So Norma and other Indigenous people rallied together to support one another, joining in tradition and community.
Themes
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.
Students were suffering and dying in Thunder Bay, and people like Norma were determined to stop them from falling through the cracks and disappearing or dying. The police weren’t taking care of Ricki—and neither, ostensibly, was the boarding family he lived with. Norma decided to take his well-being into her own hands and to try to impress upon him that there was support available to him—even if it hadn’t seemed that way so far.
Themes
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.
Again, Ricki showed the police, Norma, and everyone who accompanied him to the river that day that he already knew, on some level, what had happened to his brother. Ricki might not have been able to remember large swaths of the night his brother disappeared, but he had a sense of what had happened to Reggie nonetheless.
Themes
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.
Ricki’s instinct was right—the police found Reggie’s body exactly where Ricki told them to look. This is significant and even profound—as soon as the Thunder Bay Police actually began listening to and honoring the wishes of Indigenous people, they were able to recover Ricki’s body.
Themes
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.
Some people had finally had enough—children were dying in Thunder Bay, and the deaths were too eerily similar to ignore. In neglecting the suspicious circumstances around and the patterns to the deaths, the inquest argued, the coroner’s office was essentially allowing more and more Indigenous youths to remain vulnerable to harm.
Themes
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.
When the coroner’s office refused to honor the request to hold an inquest into all the deaths, they were essentially stating that Indigenous people didn’t deserve to have a say in the investigations of their own murders. White Canadians were once again behaving as if they knew best what was right for Indigenous people and doing so in a way that seemed to make it clear that the goal was to actually deny any voice to those Indigenous people.
Themes
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.
By fighting to ensure that Indigenous cases would be heard by Indigenous juries, Falconer was fighting to help Indigenous people keep at least parts of their own traditions. Having white Canadians—many of whom, the events of the book have shown, are overtly racist and disinterested in Indigenous issues—hear Indigenous cases would be yet another form of colonial oppression.
Themes
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.
Darryl’s story reveals the deep, ingrained racism and colonial violence that still exist in Thunder Bay. Darryl was alone and vulnerable on the streets of Thunder Bay when white men attacked him because of his race—and threw him in the river. Given that three male Indigenous students died and were found in the rivers of Thunder Bay, this passage seems to imply that the boys’ deaths might not have been accidents at all. And yet the Thunder Bay Police had been quick to state, in each case, that no foul play was involved. So, the text seems to posit, the police might have been actively covering something up—or they were simply patently uninterested in securing justice for Indigenous children in such a way that they negligently enabled racist violence in Thunder Bay.
Themes
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.
Even when Darryl brought his story to the police, they never followed up on the information he provided—information that was clearly relevant to three recent deaths in the city. This reveals the racism that defines how white Canadians in positions of power respond to Indigenous issues. The Thunder Bay Police never took any real action in Darryl’s defense—and in the meantime, more students continued to die.
Themes
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.
Just as the Thunder Bay police ignored Darryl’s story in a moment of need, so too did Canadian government official Chuch Strahl ignore Shannen and her classmates as they asked for nothing more than attention and equity. White apathy and negligence toward Indigenous issues, the book suggests, is just a new form of colonial violence and cultural genocide aimed at weakening and erasing Indigenous communities.
Themes
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.
When Shannen couldn’t affect change through direct communication or a diplomatic channel, she took a different approach. She didn’t give into bitterness—rather, she found solidarity in her community and rooted her response to the cruelty in hope. As Shannen reminded her audience that school was a “time for dreams,” she even hinted at the struggles the students in Thunder Bay were facing. Rather than having time to focus on their dreams or educations, they were enduring very real threats of violence and death. Shannen’s approach, rooted in her culture’s traditional approaches to conflict resolution, resulted in the Prime Minister speaking out on the failings of his government.
Themes
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.
Here, Fiddler directly connects the trauma of the residential schools to the enduring struggles with depression, substance abuse, and isolation that define life for many Indigenous teens. This is significant because it shows that while generational trauma shows up in many different ways, its existence (and its connection to the residential schools) is undeniable.
Themes
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.
By arguing for Indigenous representation on juries dealing with, Falconer was making a stand. He was saying, on behalf of his clients, that Indigenous people would no longer allow white Canadians—who’d time and time again proven a complete disinterest in the issues facing Indigenous communities—to determine the fates of Indigenous people when it came to justice.
Themes
