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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapter 9-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

Content Warning: These Chapter Summaries & Analyses discuss potential child abuse and alcohol use that are described in the text. Additionally, to highlight racism and apathy toward Indigenous communities, Talaga reproduces offensive terms that non-Indigenous Canadians often use to describe Indigenous peoples.

Talaga begins by describing the Ojibwe legend about the giant Nanabijou, a powerful and benevolent god. Nanabijou cared deeply about the Ojibwe tribe, who lived in the Great Lakes area. He possessed a rock with “a shiny metal that twinkled like the starry sky” (1), which he gifted to the Ojibwe. This gift was silver. Nanabijou made the Ojibwe promise to not tell anyone else about the silver, especially the Europeans who had arrived in the area. If the Ojibwe kept their promise, then Nanabijou would always protect them. Unfortunately, a Oceti Sakowin man heard about the silver and tricked the Ojibwe into telling him where he could find it. He mined the silver and headed back to his people, but the Europeans caught him. Initially, the Oceti Sakowin man refused to tell the Europeans where he found the silver. However, the Europeans loosened the Oceti Sakowin man’s tongue with “firewater”—alcohol. A falcon overheard the Oceti Sakowin man telling the Europeans Nanabijou’s secret and went to warn Nanabijou, but it was too late. Nanabijou “turned from warm flesh and blood to solid stone” (3) because of the betrayal. The Ojibwe lost their greatest protector.

Nanabijou’s stone body can be seen in the water from the city of Thunder Bay, which is located on the shores of Gichigami, or Lake Superior, in northwestern Ontario, Canada. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world; hundreds of rivers, including the Kaministiquia (Kam), pour into it. The land surrounding Lake Superior was the home of the Ojibwe people and other Indigenous groups before European colonization. These Indigenous peoples used the rivers for travel and hunting as well as meeting places.

When the Europeans, especially the British, arrived in Thunder Bay, they wanted the Indigenous peoples “to become proper English-speaking Canadians loyal to the [British] crown” (9). To accomplish this goal, the Canadian government believed that Indigenous peoples needed to be assimilated. The government forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes and placed them in government-funded boarding schools, known as residential schools. One of the earliest residential schools in Thunder Bay was St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, which was previously an orphanage. The residential school system forbade children from speaking their native language or practicing their cultural traditions.

A notable feature of Thunder Bay is the James Street swing bridge, which somebody burned in 2013. The bridge plays an important role in the disappearance of Jordan Wabasse, whom Chapter 1 discusses. The bridge, which overlooks the Kam, used to be one of two entrances to Fort William First Nation.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Notes from a Blind Man”

In Chapter 1, Talaga focuses primarily on the disappearance of Jordan Wabasse, who was originally from Webequie First Nation but moved to Thunder Bay to continue his education and play hockey. Talaga first describes visions about Jordan’s disappearance from a blind Elder. The Elder describes the area around the Kam. He then says that Jordan met two people on the night he disappeared. There was a fight. The Elder says that the two people are “definitely trying to hide” (24). He sees Jordan standing near the swing bridge and elevators.

Next, Talaga describes in detail the last day anyone saw Jordan, which was February 7, 2011. Throughout the day, his family—including his cousin and boarding parent Clifford—and friends saw Jordan at the bus stop, at school, and at the Intercity Shopping Centre, which was a popular hangout for teenagers, where Jordan drank alcohol with some friends the evening of his disappearance. The mall camera captured Jordan’s image around 8:15pm. He told friends he was leaving to go home to get his equipment for hockey practice. Several female high school students saw Jordan, who was holding a clear bottle, on the bus around 9:30pm. They took a video of him. In it, he said that he missed his girlfriend, Myda O’Keese. The students saw Jordan get off at the stop near his boarding house. Video from the Thunder Bay Transit captured Jordan at 10:00pm. The blind Elder believed that one of the girls knew more than she told police and school officials.

Jordan’s boarding family started to worry when he didn’t show up for dinner, especially since he had hockey practice in the evening and planned to talk to Myda after practice. Jordan was responsible and unlikely to miss commitments. Clifford called the Thunder Bay Police to report Jordan missing on the morning of February 8. However, the police didn’t start a missing person’s investigation until late that evening, and it took several more days for them to start interviewing witnesses and conducting ground searches.

A community search team from Webequie was the first to find evidence, six days after Jordan’s disappearance. They located a baseball cap and footprints in the snow. The footprints ran from the James Street swing bridge to the river. Once the searchers found the cap, they contacted the Indigenous police force and Jordan’s parents, Bernice and Derek, who both immediately flew to Thunder Bay. Police asked Bernice for a DNA sample. The police then called in divers. The divers searched the river but didn’t find any physical evidence.

One month after Jordan’s disappearance, an Indigenous search team from Cat Lake First Nation, guided by the blind Elder’s vision, found one of Jordan’s sneakers along the riverbank. They also found drag marks, blood, and two teeth in the snow. They informed the police of their findings. It was later confirmed that while the sneaker belonged to Jordan, the blood and teeth didn’t.

Like the Elder, Meredith Anderson from Kasabonika First Nation had visions about Jordan, whom she didn’t know well. In these visions, she saw Jordan standing “by the swing bridge and the grain elevators” (40). This was, eerily, the exact same spot where the Elder described seeing Jordan.

Two rumors spread related to Jordan’s disappearance. The first was that Native Syndicate street gang members mistakenly kidnapped him. These gang members mistook Jordan Wabasse for Jordan Waboose, a man who supposedly owed them money. Jordan Waboose’s mother thought this rumor could be true, partly because of a Facebook chat between Jordan Waboose and one of his friends. Police saw this Facebook chat. They interviewed Jordan Waboose, but he denied having drug debts and said that the drug debt rumor might have been started by another person, Kenny Wabasse, or his mom, “because she was always trying to get him in trouble” (46).

The second rumor was that students from Dennis Franklin Cromarty (DFC) High School chased Jordan onto the frozen river and Jordan then fell through the ice. Police interviewed several students who said this rumor was a lie.

Ninety-two days after Jordan Wabasse’s disappearance, boaters called police to report a body in the river. Police recovered the body and confirmed that it was Jordan’s. Several days later, police received a phone call from a staff member of a coed home for teens. The staff member told police that one of their residents heard that two men, Steven Cole and another man, pushed Jordan off the James Street swing bridge after Jordan, who was drunk, tried to get into a fight with them. Police interviewed Steven in 2011, but Steven denied this accusation. Five years after Jordan’s death, a friend of Steven’s admitted in a courtroom that Steven told him he pushed Jordan into the river. The friend believed Steven because, at the time, he was clearly distressed.

Jordan’s death still doesn’t have an explanation. Police don’t know how Jordan, who was nearly home the night he disappeared, ended up miles away in the frozen river. The final autopsy report, which coroner Dr. Michael Wilson supervised, ruled Jordan’s death an accident. Dr. Wilson believed that Jordan drowned, although Jordan’s family and friends vehemently disagree with this ruling.

Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis

Taken together, the Prologue and first chapter of Seven Fallen Feathers provide an important overview for the perspective of the book as a whole. In both the Prologue and Chapter 1, Talaga lays out the history and culture of Thunder Bay as well as the broader treatment of Indigenous peoples by Canadian society, which is important for understanding the stories of “the seven fallen feathers” (11), or the seven students who died. Her narrative emphasizes the pervasiveness of structural racism and apathy in critical institutions.

Chapter 1 describes how Talaga began her investigation into the deaths of these seven children. She initially goes to the headquarters of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN), a political organization that represents Indigenous communities living in Ontario, to discuss the lack of Indigenous civil engagement in the 2011 federal election with NAN’s grand chief at that time, Stan Beardy. Beardy won’t answer Talaga’s voting questions. Instead, he talks to her about the disappearance of Jordan Wabasse, a 15-year-old Indigenous boy, and asks her why she isn’t writing about him and the six other children who died in Thunder Bay.

Talaga eventually recognizes the significance of what Stan was trying to tell her: Seven children died over a period of 11 years in Thunder Bay, and few people outside of Indigenous communities in northern Ontario know about the story. As Talaga notes, “Seven is a highly symbolic number in Indigenous culture” (16). For one thing, the number reflects the Anishinaabe prophecy of the seven fires, which describes the seven phases of life of the Indigenous peoples in North America. Stan, whose only son was beaten to death at a house party at 19 years old, takes Talaga to the Kam. He explains how he thinks Jordan was chased into the river. This trip marks the start of Talaga’s investigation into the “seven fallen feathers.”

To help characterize the experiences of Indigenous children and adults in the book, Talaga writes in first person, telling the stories of the seven fallen feathers in present tense. These stylistic choices help Talaga make her narrative relatable when describing issues that many readers, primarily those who identify as white, won’t have any experiences with, inviting readers to really think about the challenges that Indigenous youth and their communities face. In doing so, readers can realize that meaningful change needs to occur to help combat the injustices and inequities that Indigenous peoples still live with in Canada.

Additionally, Talaga introduces two themes in this section. The first is Systemic Racism Within the Educational Institution. Although the last residential school closed in the 1990s, remote Indigenous communities still lack access to education, despite the federal government’s promise to invest in education for these communities. Talaga notes:

The quality of teaching standards and equipment at reserve schools varies widely from coast to coast. Fundamentals that other school jurisdictions take for granted, such as libraries, gymnasiums, and science labs, are routinely absent (20).

While going to high school in one’s own community and receiving an adequate education should be a basic right for all Canadian students, this isn’t the case for most Indigenous children. For this reason, parents are still forced to send their children to high schools and colleges located far from their home even though the Indian Residential School System is no longer in place.

The second theme that Talaga introduces in this section is The Failure of Policing and Justice Systems. Police mishandled Jordan’s case from the very beginning. They introduced confusion about when Jordan actually went missing, which delayed their starting key interviews with witnesses and on-the-ground searches by the river. In addition, they ignored evidence presented to them by Indigenous searchers, including the drag marks near the river and the placement of Jordan’s clothing, facts that indicated the possibility of foul play. The police quickly dismissed rumors that Jordan might have been pushed into the river despite multiple witnesses suggesting that this is what happened. When Jordan’s body was recovered, the investigation simply hit a dead-end, which becomes a common trajectory in the deaths of the other six Indigenous children. No arrests were made related to Jordan’s disappearance or death, no charges were filed, and no determination was made as to why Jordan ended up in the frozen river despite being nearly home the night he went missing. These mistakes point to how Thunder Bay’s police rushed the investigation and didn’t seem to care about getting justice for Jordan.