Thursday 16 November 2017

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



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.
Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that makes me feel near paralysed by helplessness: In straightforward reportage, investigative journalist Tanya Talaga tells the stories of seven Indigenous teenagers who died while attending the Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario between its opening, in 2000, and 2011 (when Talaga began her investigation). Established to educate students who are flown in from remote northern reserves, this Indigenous-administrated private school of about 150 grade 9-12 students not only provides classroom instruction, but offers 24 hour/day counselling and arranges the offsite boarding for these kids who are often in “the big city” for the first time. Although none of these tragic deaths occurred on school property, Talaga is able to paint a perilous picture for any Indigenous person who chooses to live in Thunder Bay; made exponentially more dangerous for loosely supervised youths who have no choice but to move to Thunder Bay to attend high school, and who might turn to drugs and alcohol out of boredom or a desire to fit in. And as perilous as this picture is, I have no idea how to fix it; hence the paralysis. I couldn't help but get my back up at some of Talaga's accusations of Canada's “apartheid” culture, and I didn't always follow along with her conclusions, but this book is an important work of witnessing and should be widely read.

Talaga starts at the beginning – with the history of Thunder Bay and its surrounding First Nations – and after covering the horrors of residential schools, and after their closure, the pressing need for decent post-secondary schooling for those students who outgrow whatever underfunded elementary education their home reserves offer, Talaga describes Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School – a school run by Natives themselves that provides “a First Nations' education system that enforces academic standards, reinforces cultural identity, and enables learners to contribute with confidence to the well-being of the global community” (from the school's website) – and who, Native or non-Native, wouldn't like the sound of that? Tragically, within weeks of DFC first opening, 15-year-old student Jethro Anderson was found dead in Thunder Bay's Kaministiquia River. In retracing what is known of Jethro Anderson's last day, Talaga writes that he had been drinking all evening, and although no one knows how he made his way from his bus stop to the river, Talaga insists that his death couldn't have been accidental – no Native youth, raised around lakes and rivers, would have entered the cold water willingly. Although there was never any evidence of foul play, and I couldn't quite understand Talaga's insistence that there must have been, there's no denying that the Thunder Bay PD did very little to find the missing teenager, and when he was recovered from the river, they were quick to close the case.

This same pattern is seen in most of the stories of the seven “fallen feathers”: Jordan Wabasse, Curran Strang, Kyle Morrisseau, and Reggie Bushie were all drinking heavily the nights they disappeared and were later found in the water. Robyn Harper was heavily intoxicated and aspirated on her vomit as she lay in the hallway of her boarding house. Paul Panacheese had not been drinking or using drugs, and although he didn't appear to have anything physically wrong with him, the young man simply dropped dead in the house he was sharing with his mother. In each case of drowning, Talaga insists that they must have encountered foul play, and in every case, it is the indifferent response of the police, the coroner, and the justice system that the author particularly underlines; just another dead Indian; case closed.

At the urging of a high profile Toronto lawyer, an inquest was eventually held into these seven deaths, and the jury came back with dozens of recommendations; including maybe not forcing teenagers to travel hundreds of kilometres away from their families in order to receive a basic education. Two more DFC students have drowned in Thunder Bay since the inquest closed.

I did have a hard time accepting Talaga's insistence that those who drowned would never have willingly gone into cold rivers, and although she does describe the binge-drinking that most of them engaged in on the nights they disappeared, Talaga never suggests that any of them may have stumbled off a riverbank or fallen off a bridge. On the other hand, she does include the stories of a couple of Natives who survived beatings by groups of white men (including one who was left for dead in a river), so without outright saying so, I imagine that Talaga is trying to make the point that systemic racism in Thunder Bay has led to groups of white men going around throwing Native teenagers into the water; all tacitly accepted by the systemic racism of the white police and coroner's office. If that's her suspicion, I wish she would have come right out and said it: after the horrifying story of Barbara Kentner's senseless death – succumbing to the internal trauma caused by a trailer hitch being thrown at her from the window of a moving pickup as she walked down the side of a Thunder Bay street – I would have believed it (and am gratified to have heard this week that the perpetrator, Brayden Bushby, has had the charges against him upgraded to second degree murder).

I also don't understand the logistics of opening a proper high school on every reserve in Canada, but I do agree that this is a human rights issue, and despite my feelings of paralysis on the matter, I hope there are people out there with the power to make things happen. Education is the first step to all social change, and Seven Fallen Feathers is a vital lesson in what's going on today.




*Won by Life on the Ground Floor. All of these books are worthy finalists, and I learned a lot, but my favourite would be Tomboy Survival Guide as the best written/most eye-opening.
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