THUNDER BAY—Grade 9 student Jordan Wabasse vanished Feb. 7 after getting off a city bus, just a block from his boarding house but hundreds of kilometres from home.

“We have no idea what happened,” says Derek Jacob, who does not believe his son has run away.

Wabasse, 15, is one of seven native teens to have disappeared from the Thunder Bay area since 2000. All had come from remote northern reserves to attend high school because there was no suitable school for them back home.

A provincial coroner’s inquest into the October 2007 drowning of 15-year-old Reggie Bushie, which was scheduled for June 2009, has been delayed indefinitely because of legal arguments. The inquest into his death and the four students who died before him was also to have looked at the effects of removing native children from their home to send them away to school.

“These are 14- and 15-year-olds trying to manage on their own,” says Nishnawbe-Aski Nation Grand Chief Stan Beardy. “They are just kids.”

In Canada, native education is a federal responsibility and funding to the schools has simply not kept up, says National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo.

Some schools are missing science labs, libraries, computers, or, there isn’t a school at all and children are sent away.

On average, a child going to school on a reserve is funded at $2,000 less per year than a child going to school in a neighbouring community, Atleo says.

“There is a basic and fundamental inequity here,” Atleo says. “It denies our children what every other child in Canada has.”

Since Bushie’s death, Kyle Morrisseau, the grandson of famed Ojibway artist Norval Morrisseau was found dead in the McIntyre River floodway, Wabasse disappeared, and three of the other teens were eventually found drowned in the waters that feed into Lake Superior.

Robyn Harper died of asphyxiation in an alleged alcohol-related death. She was the only one not found in water. It is unclear of the circumstances that lead up to the deaths of most of the teens.

Six of the dead natives were students at Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, which is administered by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council and funded by the federal government.

Nearly 100 kids go to school here. Each has left their home in the Sioux Lookout area, hundreds of kilometres away, to board with other families.

“The kids who come to Thunder Bay do not come by choice,” says principal Jonathan Kakegamic. “They come to further their education. For our people in Sioux Lookout, you need to leave.”

Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School first opened in 2000 and since then, the loss of six students — Jethro Anderson, Paul Panacheese, Curran Strang, Harper, Bushie and Morrisseau — is palpable. (Wabasse attended the Matawa Learning Centre.)

“It’s awful,” says vice-principal Sharon Angeconeb. “Everyday we thought they would come back.”

Teacher Greg Quachegan, who taught Curran and Panacheese, still finds it painful to stare at their desks.

When the kids come to Thunder Bay they are not used to being in a city, they are homesick with free time and often no money, he says.

Students can be targets of easy targets for native gangs. “Students get harassed for not joining,” he says. “They get homesick. They miss traditional foods — wild meat. A lot don’t have money.”

Conscious of the loneliness, DFC teachers act as surrogate parents, says Angeconeb.

Native art hangs throughout the school and large murals painted by the students adorn the walls. There is an elder on site all day. She occupies a comfortable room that always has tea brewed and bannock at hand. DFC provides breakfast and lunch for the kids as many come to school hungry.

“We tell all our staff they have to be committed, they need to come for the students,” she says. “We are their moms and dads. Our school work doesn’t end when the bell rings.”

To that end, some of the staff are on call 24 hours a day in a unique after-hours program.

They patrol the streets in a van, searching popular hangouts including the river banks, after school until the wee hours of the morning looking for wayward kids.

“When you send a 14-year-old to high school — hundreds of them — logic dictates there will be accidents,” says Kakegamic.

Wabasse was from Webequie First Nations, a growing community 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.

With a birthrate three times higher than the national average, First Nations communities are teeming with children and Webequie is no different.

Sadly, many are born into lives of poverty and despair.

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The unemployment rate at Webequie hovers at 95 per cent even though the reserve’s traditional lands sit on what international mining companies are calling the Ring of Fire — a potentially $30 billion deposit of chromite, the mineral used to make stainless steel.

Wabasse, a talented hockey player, longed to play with other boys in a more organized league and at a real hockey rink, says his dad, Derek Jacob.

Jordan begged to go to Thunder Bay to school. The Jacobs thought he could have a better education in the city and let him go.

This was Wabasse’s first time alone in the city.

On Tuesday, Feb. 8, the Thunder Bay boarding house where Wabasse was staying called his parents to say he didn’t come home the night before.

Since then Wabasse’s parents, Derek and Bernice Jacob, have lived a nightmare.

With the support of their band, an outpouring of donations from northern First Nations and even Jordan’s hockey team the Current River Comets, a command centre was set up in an old Canadian Red Cross building downtown.

It has been more than 71 days since he went missing yet the volunteers — many from neighbouring northern bands with experience in tracking — keep coming. Nearly 60 people a day are fed lunch, dinner and sometimes breakfast.

On March 21 volunteers found a sneaker believed to belong to Jordan on the shores of the Kaministiquia.

Police divers using sonar equipment have scoured the river twice but have found no trace of the shy teen.

Two weeks ago, Thunder Bay police announced DNA tests prove the Maple Leafs hat found offshore by searchers is Wabasse’s.

Footprints were also found by the shoreline, says Thunder Bay Police Services executive officer Chris Adams.

“In the absence of not finding Jordan, we can’t rule out foul play,” he says.

Native educator Cindy Blackstock says it will take a “million man march”— reminiscent of U.S. civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. — to raise awareness of education inequities.

Governments, provincial and federal, build two bridges for children, she says.

“One for non-aboriginal children that goes from one side of a rapid river to another side,” she says. “Most children are able to safely cross to a possibility of opportunity and life.

“And then governments build a bridge for First Nations children but it only goes halfway over the rapids. And when the children fall into the rapids and First Nations children and their families are screaming, the province of Ontario and the federal government say to First Nations, ‘Aren’t you thankful for the half of a bridge we built?’ ”

The federal department of Indian and Northern Affairs would not comment on this story. Instead, they referred calls back to the aboriginal authority in charge of DFC.