7/11/2023 0 Comments Seven feathers![]() ![]() We all have a responsibility towards children, as our future. ![]() Seven Fallen Feathers is not about blame it is about responsibility. Trigger warnings, obvs, in this book and review for discussions of suicide, violence (particularly against women and youth), binge drinking, and racial slurs. I’m going to review this book first for a general audience, then I’m going to get into my reaction to it as a settler from Thunder Bay. Tanya Talaga, by investigating and piecing together the stories of these seven deaths, and by putting them in the larger context of our colonial history, has created an enduring record that-I hope-is more difficult to ignore. But after the interest in those stories dies down, and the spotlight of the press turns away, life in this city goes on. Over the past few years, I’ve seen my city come up in the national media from time to time-and often related to Indigenous issues, such as the deaths or inquests of the students in this book. Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City is one of those books I wish didn’t exist but am so grateful it does. She lives in Toronto with her two teenage children. Her mother was raised in Raith and Graham, Ontario. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation. Her great-grandfather, Russell Bowen, was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor. Talaga is of Polish and Indigenous descent. She was also named the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy. For more than twenty years she has been a journalist at the Toronto Star, and has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction, and it was CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and a national bestseller. Her 2017 book, Seven Fallen Feathers, won the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult. Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe Canadian journalist and author. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning investigative journalist Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this small northern city that has come to manifest Canada’s long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities. Reggie Bushie’s death finally prompted an inquest, seven years after the discovery of Jethro Anderson, the first boy whose body was found in the water. Robyn Harper died in her boarding-house hallway and Paul Panacheese inexplicably collapsed on his kitchen floor. The body of celebrated artist Norval Morrisseau’s grandson, Kyle, was pulled from a river, as was Curran Strang’s. Jordan Wabasse, a gentle boy and star hockey player, disappeared into the minus twenty degrees Celsius night. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. The seven were hundreds of miles away from their families, forced to leave home and live in a foreign and unwelcoming city. More than a quarter of a century later, from 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. None of those recommendations were applied. An inquest was called and four recommendations were made to prevent another tragedy. In 1966, twelve-year-old Chanie Wenjack froze to death on the railway tracks after running away from residential school.
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