Norma Kejick Character Analysis

Norma Kejick was one of the first members of the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC) board, an organization that was created to run boarding programs and act as an authority for Indigenous students who left their reserves to pursue their educations. Norma and her fellow board members were optimistic when the NNEC began constructing a high school in Thunder Bay, Ontario where Indigenous students could go to learn and experience city life—but within a few years of the school’s opening in 2000, Norma would begin to see her and her fellow board members’ excitement as naïveté about the problems that Indigenous youth would face as they arrived in the city. Norma struggled to keep her own son, Jonathan, afloat at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School—she wound up pulling him out of school when he expressed suicidal thoughts while studying there. And as more and more Thunder Bay students began dying and disappearing, Norma herself started to question why the NNEC could not keep so many students from slipping through the cracks. Norma herself contemplated suicide at several points following the losses of the “seven fallen feathers,” the seven Indigenous students who died under suspicious circumstances in Thunder Bay in the 2000s and 2010s. But she kept herself alive and committed to fighting for Indigenous youth in spite of her own grief and frustration about the profound challenges that Indigenous students face.