Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks Theme Analysis

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.