Seven Fallen Feathers Study Guide

Tanya Talaga is an Ojibwe writer and journalist with roots in Fort William First Nation in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Toronto and worked as a journalist for the Toronto Star for more than 20 years. In 2011, while writing a feature on Indigenous voter turnout in advance of an upcoming federal election, the tribal leaders Talaga spoke with across Ontario encouraged her to write about a more important issue: the deaths of Indigenous high school students in the Thunder Bay area. The resulting book became Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City. It was released in 2017 to great critical acclaim—it became a national bestseller, and won the RBC Taylor Prize and the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Talaga was named the 2017-2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy and delivered the 2018 Massey Lectures. Based on those lectures, she wrote a book entitled All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward, about the crisis of youth suicide in Indigenous communities across Canada. Talaga lives in Toronto.

Seven Fallen Feathers focuses primarily on the first two decades of the 21st century, exploring the social, economic, and political conditions surrounding the deaths of seven Indigenous students in the racially divided city of Thunder Bay, Ontario. But in order to fully understand the hostile climate in Thunder Bay—and how that climate has the power to destroy the lives of Indigenous students who come to the city to seek better educations and futures—one must understand the history of Canada’s cultural genocide against its Indigenous population. From the time white settlers arrived in Canada in the 15th century, they began stripping Indigenous people of their land and resources, forcing them onto reservations and conning them into unfair treaties that would define colonial relations for decades to come. When the Canadian government no longer wanted to hold up its end of the bargain on these treaties, it created residential schools. These were state-funded boarding schools that Indigenous children and teenagers were required to attend, with the goal of forcibly assimilating Indigenous children so that they’d eventually blend into white colonial society and render the treaties moot. But the residential schools were rife with abuse, disease, and dysfunction—and the trauma that the 150,000 survivors of the residential schools experienced still has devastating effects on the current generation of Indigenous youth in Canada. With reservations criminally underfunded and lacking in basic resources like electricity and running water, contemporary Indigenous youths are still essentially forced to abandon their homes and families if they want to pursue an education in Canada.

Seven Fallen Feathers is part of a rich tradition of books that explore the history of racism and cultural genocide in Canada. Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way is a memoir of Thistle’s struggles to overcome generational trauma, racism, and poverty in Canada. In Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, the author explores the ongoing legacy of colonialism and racism in Canada. Elliott recounts stories from her own life and more broadly examines how structural racism impacts Indigenous Canadian writers fighting to tell their stories. Finally, Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, which is told from the alternating viewpoints of five survivors of Canada’s residential school system, focuses specifically on the generational trauma created by the Canadian government’s re-education and assimilation program.