— Reggie Bushie —
The fifth feather
Reggie grew up with his brother Ricki in Poplar Hill, a First Nation community of less than 500 people built in the shadow of Poplar Hill Indian Residential School (208). They boarded together in Thunder Bay, where Reggie was 15 and just starting grade 9 at DFC.
On the night of October 26, 2007, Phil Strang, their cousin and another boarder, saw Ricki arrive at the house disoriented and soaking wet, with Reggie nowhere to be seen. Cheyenne Linklater, Robyn Harper's boarding parent, called the police two days later to report Reggie as missing (211-212).
As part of their investigation, the Thunder Bay Police questioned Ricki, the last person to have seen Reggie alive. They brought him down to the station multiple times, questioning him up to three times a day without notifying his parents. Rhoda King, Ricki's mother, did not know that Reggie was missing until the 29th (212).
When Reggie was found in the McIntyre River on November 1, 2007, he marked the fifth DFC student to have died in seven years, and the third to have drowned. The next day, the Thunder Police released a press release that had become all too familiar to the students of DFC: "foul play is not suspected" (226).
Continue to learn about Kyle Morrisseau, the sixth feather