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Thousands of fallen feathers

Part 1 of 2 Last week, a 14-year-old Indigenous girl was reported missing in Kenora, a town about the size of Quesnel in northwestern Ontario, near the border with Manitoba.
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Part 1 of 2

Last week, a 14-year-old Indigenous girl was reported missing in Kenora, a town about the size of Quesnel in northwestern Ontario, near the border with Manitoba.

Fortunately, she was found safe and unharmed on Saturday, according to the Chronicle Journal, the daily newspaper in Thunder Bay, 500 kilometres away.

Thunder Bay is the Prince George of northern Ontario. Although it has about 25,000 more people, it, like Prince George, is an isolated regional hub, a full day's drive from a major urban centre, surrounded by lakes, rivers, trees and small mountains, with a large Indigenous population, both within the city and throughout the broader region.

Even more so than northern B.C., northern Ontario is dotted with tiny, isolated First Nations communities, many of them only accessible by air and/or logging roads during the summer.

Both Prince George and Thunder Bay have also suffered.

Prince George has had to endure the murder of four women by the youngest serial killer in Canadian history. Prince George is also part of the Highway of Tears.

Roxanne Thiara, 15, was last seen alive in Prince George and her body was found in August 1994 off Highway 16 near Burns Lake. Alishia Germaine, also just 15, was found on Dec. 9, 1994 behind the former Haldi Road elementary school in Prince George. She had been stabbed to death. Twelve years ago, on Feb. 2, 2006, Aielah Auger disappeared. The body of the 14-year-old student at D.P. Todd secondary school was found eight days later in a ditch near Tabor Mountain, a short drive east of Prince George along Highway 16 .

Those three murders remain unsolved, as do the deaths of 15 other women last seen near one of three highways in B.C.'s central interior.

Thunder Bay's pain has been equally devastating, as Toronto Star reporter Tanya Talaga recounts in her powerful book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City. Between 2000 and 2011, seven Indigenous students from the same high school died in Thunder Bay.

All seven teenagers were from area First Nations reserves, living in Thunder Bay to finish their high school education.

As Talaga explains, many Northern Ontario reserves have poor housing with no running water and homemade wood stoves to heat the homes. Some of the schools aren't in much better shape. Substance abuse, domestic violence and suicide are rife.

Out of such adverse conditions, hundreds of teenagers emerge each year showing personal and academic promise.

To finish high school, these teenagers must go to Kenora or Thunder Bay or a handful of small communities along Highway 17 or the Trans-Canada Highway. Thunder Bay has often been the first choice, however, because of its relatively easier access by air and because of the community support system for Indigenous students available at Dennis Franklin Cromarty high school and in the community.

Yet that support is not nearly enough for many of the teenagers. Not only are they emotionally fragile young people away from home and family for the first time, Talaga describes how deep the culture shock runs for kids who have never seen a traffic light or been inside a shopping mall before arriving in Thunder Bay. The fortunate ones live with distant relations or family friends.

The others live with billets, who are paid to feed them but not to parent them.

In Thunder Bay and Prince George, teenagers will gather in groups large and small to party, experimenting with sex, drugs and alcohol.

In both communities, the bush is near, as are secluded wooded areas within the city, often near bodies of water. Five of the seven high schoolers died in one of the Thunder Bay rivers that flow into Lake Superior, usually having gone missing late at night after partying with friends.

Prince George doesn't just share senseless deaths of vulnerable young people with Thunder Bay, however, but also the racism and the hard truths in Talaga's book title.

More on that tomorrow.

-- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout