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

by Tanya Talaga

The groundbreaking and multiple award-winning national bestseller work about systemic racism, education, the failure of the policing and justice systems, and Indigenous rights by Tanya Talaga.

Over the span of eleven years, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario. They were hundreds of kilometres away from their families, forced to leave home because there was no adequate high school on their reserves. Five were found dead in the rivers surrounding Lake Superior, below a sacred Indigenous site. Using a sweeping narrative focusing on the lives of the students, award-winning author Tanya Talaga delves into the history of this northern city that has come to manifest Canada's long struggle with human rights violations against Indigenous communities.

• ISBN10: 1487002262
• ISBN13: 9781487002268
• Publish Date: 16 November 2017
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: CA
• Imprint: House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

This is one of the most devastating books I've ever read. It's also one that I think every Canadian should read, if not everyone who benefits from the legacy of colonialism. Though the focus of the book is on the deaths of seven northern Indigenous students attending high school in Thunder Bay, Ontario, it contextualizes their lives and deaths through an exploration of the residential school system and the colonialism that produced it. It takes to task the absolute complacency of the provincial and federal governments and Canadians in general. Despite an eight-month inquest into the deaths, these students' families have little to no closure due to racist, indifferent police work that has left all seven deaths of indeterminate cause. It seems wildly unlikely that five different teenagers accidentally drowned in the river, but we will never really know what happened thanks to deliberately sloppy investigations that absolutely failed to take into account the humanity of the victims and their families. The callousness of the Thunder Bay police is disturbing to the highest degree. While I found the writing was at times a bit clunky or corny, this book is powerful and searing, a serious cry for change. "Shameful" doesn't even begin to cover how terribly Indigenous communities have been let down. Neocolonialism is alive and well in the shocking inequities that the government has done little to mitigate despite plenty of promises.