Seven Fallen Feathers

On my trip last week I read the book Seven Fallen Feathers.  It uses the stories of seven young Indigenous people who died in Thunder Bay over only a handful of years to explain something much bigger - the way that Indigenous people in Canada have been terribly mistreated over many generations.

The book does not paint a good picture of Thunder Bay, my hometown.  Thunder Bay is the hate crime and murder capital of Canada.  Those hate crimes are overwhelmingly targeted at Indigenous people, and racism, when you are in Thunder Bay, generally means anti-Indigenous hatred and bigotry.

I knew that was true, to an extent, when I was younger.  I just didn't realize quite how bad it was.  Reading about how the kids who had to travel from far away reserves to Thunder Bay for high school were pelted with garbage from passing cars on a regular basis just sickened me.  Worse than that, a Indigenous woman died when people threw a trailer hitch out of a car at her just a few years ago.  It isn't just cruelty - this bigotry spills over into murder.

The way the police and other officials treated these cases was tragic.  When they found a Indigenous kid dead in the river, the police instantly declared it an accident and moved on.  Maybe it was an accident.  Hard to say, sometimes, and information was sketchy.  But they police made it clear that they weren't declaring it an accident because they did everything possible to determine the cause and that was the logical conclusion.  They declared it an accident because investigating the death of a Indigenous kid just wasn't worth their time or attention.  Those deaths didn't count.

When people call for Indigenous people to just work harder, get better, fix their own circumstances, they completely ignore things like this.  How do you get a job when people refuse to hire you?  How do you build a network of professional contacts in a big city when you have never seen things like a streetlight?  How do you trust in the police and other authorities when you know that if you were murdered they would just shrug, call it an accident, and forget about it?

All of that is compounded by the long term destruction wrought by residential schools.  Whole generations of kids were taken, literally at gunpoint, to schools where they were regularly starved, beaten, raped, denied their names, culture, and family support, and then dumped back in reservations at the end.  Even if they escaped the medical starvation experiments (conducted on Indigenous kids without knowledge or consent of them or their parents, naturally) and didn't die at school (many thousands did), how do you then build a life after that?

How the HELL do you excuse thousands of children dying at school?  I can't comprehend it.

Seven Fallen Feathers gives both an understanding of the history that led to the challenges Indigenous people face now, and current examples of how that situation plays out.  It is a hard book to read, but an important one, especially for white people in Canada.  Atrocities are not something that only happens in other countries.  They have happened here, and they continue.  We need to do more to repair the mistakes of the past, and prevent more tragedy in the future, and understanding the problem, both past and present, is key to that.