Norma Kejick Character Analysis in Seven Fallen Feathers

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.

Norma Kejick Character Timeline in Seven Fallen Feathers

The timeline below shows where the character Norma Kejick appears in Seven Fallen Feathers. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

...to local buildings and essentially “call in” to lectures at schools that were far away. Norma Kejick was one of the first people on the NNEC board, and she was determined... (full context)

...a student had gone missing within a month of the school’s opening. But in hindsight, Norma Kejick now sees how “naïve” she and her fellow educators were. A report released in... (full context)

One night, Norma received a call from her son, Jonathan, a student at DFC. He told her that... (full context)

Tradition, Prophecy, Spirituality, and Hope Theme Icon

On October 29, Norma Kejick was at lunch with her NNEC colleague Lydia Big George when she got the... (full context)

The boys told Norma that they’d been sitting around drinking lots of alcohol, and that at one point in... (full context)

The next day, Norma accompanied Ricki, an Elder, several students from the brothers’ community of Poplar Hill, and a... (full context)

That afternoon, Norma called the police to tell them that they were dredging the river in the wrong... (full context)

...school counselor) telling him that Kyle was still nowhere to be found. Next, Robbie called Norma, now the NNEC director of education. She was devastated that yet another boy was missing.... (full context)

Norma Kejick stayed in Thunder Bay for the duration of the eight-month inquest. By the end... (full context)