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

“In 1966, St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School was finally demolished. At least six students lost their lives and another sixteen were unaccounted for. One of the school’s famous residents was the acclaimed Ojibwe painter Norval Morrisseau. His grandson Kyle Morrisseau is one of the seven students who are the subject of this book. Sitting on the site of the former residential school now is a Catholic elementary school, Pope John Paul II. No special plaque or monument was mounted to remember Thunder Bay’s complicity in this dark chapter in Canada’s history, until June 19, 2017, when a mural was unveiled, depicting the old school and its students. Now every September 30, Indigenous people in Thunder Bay and across Canada commemorate all residential school survivors on Orange Shirt Day, the national day of remembrance.”

This passage highlights several important elements of Talaga’s story. The first is the dark reality of residential schools. Apologists of these schools often argue that the schools did the best they could to provide Indigenous children with medical care and education at a time when Indigenous communities were being ravished by disease. This thinking is wrong. Because funding was tied to the number of Indigenous children at these schools, the schools were often overcrowded. Moreover, the goal of the schools was to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into white Canadian society. Children faced physical and sexual assault, starvation, and more. The second is that these schools traumatized not only those who attended them but also the residential school survivors’ children and their children’s children. The death of Kyle Morrisseau highlights the legacy of intergenerational trauma. Canada tried to hide the horrors of its Indian residential school system. The ancestors of residential school survivors, including those who attended St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, fought long and hard for communities to acknowledge and memorialize the sites of these schools.