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

Seven Fallen Feathers was released in Canada in 2017 but has found a recent release in Australia via Scribe Publications. Its release is particularly timely considering news of the present day.

In recent months, unmarked burial sites have been uncovered throughout former residential schools in Canada. The remains of 215 Indigenous children were uncovered at Kaloomps Residential School in British Columbia. Further, a shocking 751 were uncovered at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. This news follows decades of abuse perpetuated by the residential school system—a colonial project enacted by the Canadian government and administered by Christian churches over nearly two centuries.

Anishinaabe Canadian author Tanya Talaga has been committed to uncovering the legacy of the residential school system. Residential schools—which purported to assimilate Indigenous children to Canadian society—officially ended when the last school closed its doors in 1996. However, in Seven Fallen Feathers Talaga investigates the current state of education for Indigenous children and adolescents in Canada, a situation no doubt informed by the school systems of the past.

 Talaga hones in on Thunder Bay, Ontario—home to the Nishnawbe Aski Nation—where between 2000 and 2001, seven Indigenous high school students—Jethro Anderson, Curran Strang, Paul Panacheese, Robyn Harper, Reggie Bushie Kyle Morrisseau and Jordan Wabassee--died on separate occasions. Each young person came to Thunder Bay in the hopes of continuing their high school education, hailing from other areas in Canada where such opportunities for young Indigenous people are few and far between. Finding themselves home to a foreign and at best unfriendly city, the plight of these Indigenous kids can be fraught with neglect and thinly (or not at all) veiled racism.

While educators and community members, like Northern Nishnawbe Education Council board member Norma Kejick, endeavour to support Thunder Bay students, Talaga makes a clear link between historical abuses committed against Indigenous people and the current state of affairs in places like Thunder Bay. Talaga’s greatest strength as a writer is in her ability to recount her investigative work of these multiple cases in such a way that the reader is left to reflect on Canada’s colonial legacy. In essence—how did a culture get to the point where the deaths of young Indigenous people occur so frequently? And why are bodies like the Thunder Bay Police so lacklustre in their endeavours to pursue justice?

In Talaga’s own words—

“To understand the stories of the seven lost students.. you must understand Thunder Bay’s past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distate, of a lack of cultural awareness and understanding, were planted in those early days, and how they were watered and nourished with misunderstanding and ambivalence” (p. 11).

Talaga’s read is equal parts engaging and enraging. With this new release, Australian readers especially would do well to take a look at Seven Fallen Feathers and consider the similar atrocities perpetuated against Indigenous people in our own backyard.

Seven Fallen Feathers will be available for purchase in Australia from Friday the 2nd of July.