Book review: SEVEN FALLEN FEATHERS by Tanya Talaga

Tanya Talaga, a longtime reporter for the Toronto Star, has authored an impressive investigation into the deaths of indigenous high school students in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Her book focuses in on the latter days of seven children to whom the title, Seven Fallen Feathers, refers: children whose deaths are connected by circumstance, by history, sometimes by kinship, and always by the astounding efforts of individuals and communities across the North to bring the truth of these childrens' deaths to light.

Talaga never lets the reader forget that the children whose lives - and deaths - are the focus of this book were all sent to Thunder Bay from Cree, Ojibwe, Anishinaabe homes often hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. Funding for the delivery of First Nations K-12 education is the responsibility of Canada's federal government per the conditions of Canada's Indian Act. Yet for indigenous children from communities located in what is now the province of Ontario, the only way to attain an education beyond grade eight is to be sent to board in communities like Thunder Bay. Talaga chronicles in unrelenting detail the struggle that school officials, relatives, First Nations organizations, and the children's peer groups take on as these students encounter the disruption of a life far from home, far from what is familiar, and in a city rife with both systemic and street-level anti-Aboriginal racism.

Late last year, pop culture Canada swooned with the news that terminally ill singer Gord Downie would release an album dedicated to telling the story of Chanie Wenjack, a young Ojibwe boy who died after running away from Kenora's Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School. Downie received great adulation for bringing Wenjack's tragic story to light, some fifty years after Wenjack’s death, and the album and accompanying picture book were bestsellers throughout Canada's 2016 Christmas season. Wenjack's story lingers in the backdrop of this book as one (infamous) piece of the history of racism, colonialist Canadian administration, residential schools, and the chronic displacement and dislocation of First Nations communities. However, Talaga goes far beyond mourning the sadness and tragedy of the loss of young lives in making plain the solutions sought by indigenous community members, the Canadian policy and funding changes that are sorely overdue, and the attempts to seek justice for in a Canadian policing and justice system that seems to throw up barriers at every turn.

Book details: 

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

by Tanya Talaga

Publisher: House of Anansi Press

Publication date: November 7, 2017

ISBN 9781487002268

Thanks to House of Anansi for the privilege of an advanced reader copy of this book.