Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City

Seven Fallen Feathers (2017) by Anishinaabe Canadian author and journalist Tanya Talaga focuses primarily on the lives and deaths of seven Indigenous children who died between 2000 and 2011 while pursuing their education in Thunder Bay, a city in northwestern Ontario. Their names are Jethro Anderson, Reggie Bushie, Robyn Harper, Kyle Morrisseau, Paul Panacheese, Jordan Wabasse, and Curran Strang. Each of these children had to move hundreds of miles from their families to attend high school. For many, it was the first time they’d been away from home. They struggled to adjust to this new environment, which was plagued with racism and provided minimal supervision or support. Talaga details the structural racism within the federal and education systems that led to the student’s deaths—and the subsequent failure of police and the justice system to adequately investigate their deaths.

Seven Fallen Feathers won several major awards. As a follow-up piece to the book, Talaga produced a documentary film, Spirit to Soar, which was released in 2021.

This study guide refers to the House of Anansi Press Inc. (2017) edition of the book.

Content Warning: The book (and this guide) describes child abuse, sexual and gender-based violence, drug and alcohol use, and death by suicide. Additionally, to highlight racism and apathy toward Indigenous communities, the book reproduces offensive terms used to describe Indigenous peoples.

Summary

In her Prologue, Talaga shares the Ojibwe legend about the giant Nanabijou, a powerful and benevolent god that protected the Ojibwe people living along the shore of Lake Superior. Nanabijou gifted the Ojibwe with silver, making them promise to not tell the European settlers about this gift. When this promise was broken, Ojibwe laid down atop the lake and turned to stone; thus, the Ojibwe lost their greatest protector. Today, Nanabijou’s stone body is visible from Thunder Bay. The deaths of the seven fallen feathers occurred within Nanabijou’s shadow.

Talaga then turns to the history and culture of Thunder Bay and the treatment of Indigenous peoples by Canadian society, which provides context for better understanding the stories of the seven fallen feathers (Prologue and Chapter 1). Since its founding, Thunder Bay has been dangerous for Indigenous communities. The city was split into two sides based along cultural lines and has the highest hate crime rate in Canada. Most crimes against Indigenous peoples remain unsolved. These factors contribute to Indigenous peoples’ deep sense of mistrust and suspicion toward the city’s institutions.

Structural racism is rampant within broader Canadian society too. Among the most egregious examples of this is the Indian Residential School System, which enabled the Canadian federal government to engage in cultural genocide and led to intergenerational trauma. Additionally, the federal government broke numerous treaties and promises to help improve the conditions in Indigenous communities, including providing adequate healthcare, schools and universities, fire departments, and healthy diets.

Within this context, Talaga focuses on the experiences of Indigenous students in northwestern Ontario. After encouragement from Alvin Fiddler, Nishnawbe Aski Nation’s grand chief, Talaga begins her story with Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old boy who died after escaping from the Cecilia Indian Residential School in 1966. The inquest into Chanie’s death excluded Chanie’s family, and this represents a pattern that becomes apparent throughout the book. Residential schools were horrible environments. Children starved, experienced physical and sexual abuse, and were forced to abandon their native languages and cultural traditions. The Canadian government knew about these horrors yet for decades didn’t close the residential schools. When the final residential school closed, many Indigenous communities hoped that it would be a turning point in their relationship with the government. The government promised to build schools for Indigenous children near their communities. Unfortunately, the government didn’t keep this promise.

This broken promise plays a key role in the deaths of Jordan (Chapter 1), Jethro (Chapter 3), Curran (Chapter 4), Paul (Chapter 5), Reggie (Chapter 7), Robyn (Chapter 6), and Kyle (Chapter 8). These children arrived in Thunder Bay to attend high school and struggled to adapt to the new environment, which radically differed from their home community, and to deal with intergenerational trauma. Five of them—Jethro, Curran, Reggie, Kyle, and Jordan—were found dead in the rivers surrounding Thunder Bay. Despite the mysterious circumstances of their disappearances, the police ruled out foul play for all of the deaths within hours of recovering their bodies. The police statements all concluded that the children died from accidental drowning because of excessive alcohol consumption. These statements ignore multiple inconsistencies, including that several of the children were strong swimmers and several of the bodies displayed physical abuse that suggested possible foul play. The police ignored evidence and, in all of the cases, excluded the parents and community from the justice process. Racism and apathy characterized the police handling of these and other cases of missing and dead Indigenous children. Paul died suddenly in his home, but like the cases of the other five boys, his family wasn’t included in the justice process. In fact, the coroner never even called his mom to tell her that they didn’t know how Paul died. In addition, the coroner destroyed evidence that could have been used to better understand what happened to Paul. Robyn died from acute alcohol consumption in the home of her boarding parent. Her story drives home the tragic consequence of not giving Indigenous-run schools adequate funding and resources. When school administrators found Robyn, they didn’t realize that children could die from alcohol consumption. Given Robyn’s state, she should have been taken to the hospital instead of her home. A lawyer in the 2015 inquest that examined the seven fallen feathers’ deaths believed that if she had, she might have lived.

Over 11 years, seven Indigenous children died in the same city, yet the federal government didn’t try to correct the injustices that played a role in their deaths. This is among the most frustrating parts of the story. Chapters 9 and 10 describe how several consultants and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal raised the alarm that Indigenous students were unsafe in Thunder Bay and more would die if actions, such as increasing funding for mental health services and other support systems and building schools closer to their homes, weren’t put in place. Instead, the government issued an apology about the trauma that the residential school system caused Indigenous groups. While this was historic, it didn’t address the systemic racism plaguing the country’s institutions. The children and their families never received justice despite an inquest.

Talaga ends the book by discussing the deaths of two other Indigenous teenagers in Thunder Bay in 2017. The government’s failure to repair the legacy of structural racism and colonialism means that Indigenous children continue to die in Canada. Despite the continuing cycle of injustices, however, Talaga remains hopeful that Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities will come together and move toward a future of peace and hope. Her book is a call to action, especially for non-Indigenous members of Canadian society. To bring about a more equitable and just future, the non-Indigenous and Indigenous communities must work together and demand action from the federal government.