Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Seven Fallen Feathers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism, Cultural Genocide, and Racism
Generational Trauma and Circular Suffering
Indigenous Youth, Education Reform, and Support Networks
Tradition, Prophecy, Spirituality, and Hope
Summary
Analysis
An Ojibwe legend describes the story of a giant named Nanabijou. By stomping around the large body of water called Gichigami, Nanabijou created valleys and rock faces from the landscape around him. His stomping also exposed a sparkling metal in the cliffs—silver—and so Nanabijou told the Ojibwe people who lived in his territory not to tell the encroaching white men where the silver was. As long as they kept Nanabijou’s secret, Nanabijou promised, he would protect them—but if they didn’t, something terrible would happen.
In the opening lines of the book, author Tanya Talaga relays an Ojibwe legend. Her reason for doing this is twofold. First, she’s seeking to ground her readers in the traditional legends, prophecies, and spiritual touchstones of the Ojibwe, one of Canada’s First Nations. She’s also chosen to relay a dark myth about temptation and violence in order to foreshadow the violence, suffering, and loneliness that Canada’s Indigenous people have faced throughout centuries of colonialism.
Themes
One day, the Ojibwe took in a Sioux man who claimed to be lost and in need of help. In reality, the Sioux man was a spy who’d heard stories about Nanabijou’s precious metal and longed to take it for himself. He befriended the Ojibwe and waited patiently until finally he heard some of the Ojibwe talking about where the silver was. The Sioux man stole a canoe and traveled to the silver’s hiding place. He filled his pockets with silver, but as he made his escape back down the river, he ran into a group of white men who took him prisoner.
The fact that another Indigenous person from another region betrays the Ojibwe is significant. Silver was something that the (white) colonizers wanted—and the Sioux man’s longing for it shows how colonialism and cultural genocide can erode Indigenous cultural traditions, belief systems, and spiritual integrity over time, and turn Indigenous people against themselves. Colonialism is a destructive force, and Talaga wants her readers to see how poisonous it is.
Themes
When the Sioux man tried to buy his freedom with silver, the white men demanded to know where he'd gotten it. The Sioux man refused to tell them. So that night, the white men brought out some “firewater” (alcohol) and poured it for the Sioux man until he revealed where the silver was. As soon as the Sioux man betrayed Nanabijou’s secret, Nanabijou fell down and turned from flesh and blood to stone. The Ojibwe were on their own from that moment on.
This part of the myth shows white colonizers manipulating an Indigenous man and poisoning him with alcohol. Indigenous people in Canada, the U.S., and other colonized places are often (and unfairly) racially stereotyped as alcoholics. But this myth implies that it was white colonizers who used alcohol purposely to weaken Indigenous people. More broadly, this part of the story implies how colonial influence, manipulation, and greed led colonizers to corrupt and traumatize Indigenous people for their own selfish gain. Talaga uses the story of Nanabijou’s fall to suggest that Indigenous culture has suffered and, in some cases, been abandoned as a painful side effect of colonial violence.
Themes
Thunder Bay, a city in the Canadian province of Ontario, has always been “a city of two faces”—according to author Tanya Talaga, one face is white, and one is red. The Port Arthur side of the city is the “white” side, and the Fort William side of the city—located on the Ojibwe’s traditional lands near the powerful Kaministiquia (or Kam) River—is the “red” one.
This passage uses Thunder Bay’s division and duality to suggest something larger about the state of Canadian society. Thunder Bay is divided along racial lines—and so is the rest of Canada, since white colonizers took land that was not theirs and built a society on the ruins of the Indigenous communities they destroyed.
Themes
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For over 10,000 years, many of Canada’s Indigenous people lived in a thriving society along the banks of the Kam River and the lake called Gichigami, known by most white people today as Lake Superior. The lake creates unpredictable weather around the shoreline, so when French colonizers arrived, they named it Baie de Tonnaire—Thunder Bay. Over the centuries, the colonials who have come to Canada have “marked their territory” by building generating stations on the Kam, turning the surrounding forests into logging centers, and constructing massive government buildings on the banks of the lake. But the Kam still offers Indigenous teenagers privacy and proximity to nature—as they drink, party, and talk on the riverbanks, they can feel close to their faraway homes.
Here, Talaga describes some of the practical, physical effects of Canada’s history of colonization. Sites like the Gichigami and the Kam River were (and still are) sacred to Indigenous Canadians. But white colonizers saw them only as places that could be turned into profit centers—and so as Canada has been colonized, its most sacred places have been turned into sites of industry. In spite of all that, though, Talaga shows how Indigenous Canadians have fought to maintain their connections to these sacred places in new ways. So when Indigenous teenagers who live in Thunder Bay go out to drink by the river, they’re not just picking a random spot. They’re engaging with the cultural and spiritual traditions of their people’s pasts, reclaiming a part of their ancestry that colonialism and cultural genocide sought to erase.
Themes
There is only one road to the nearby Fort William First Nation, one of the 133 Indigenous reserves in Ontario. A bridge over the Kam used to offer access to the “rez”—but after arsonists set fire to it in 2013, the city, the province, and the federal government have been arguing about who should pay for the repair.
The institutions of white Canada don’t want to invest in the improvement of Indigenous properties or resources. White colonizers took hold of Indigenous land by force—and sequestered Indigenous Canadians on small reserves. Now, the present-day government refuses to answer for its past, or to try to right its wrongs by maintaining the faltering infrastructure its predecessors pushed Indigenous Canadians onto in the first place.
Themes
Port Arthur, an upscale neighborhood, is the center of business and commerce in Thunder Bay. It is also where “the nation building of Canada” began—this is where the British Army began acquiring land from the Ojibwe, building railroads, and growing the country. As Port Arthur began to flourish, more and more settlers arrived from England, Finland, and France. The thriving fur trade meant that local Indigenous people could make a living—but by the 20th century, the trade had died out, and these Indigenous families were left living in decrepit cabins without heating or plumbing.
Here, Talaga shows how colonial Canadian society “flourish[ed]” while actively working to marginalize and exclude Indigenous Canadians from white spaces. After taking over and radically changing the communities that Indigenous people had called home for centuries, white colonizers then shunted Indigenous people quite literally to the edges of society and left them behind. When white colonizers created the social rules, the economy, and the politics of Canadian society, they purposefully left Indigenous people out of the equation.
Themes
British society in Port Arthur had become the dominant one, and Indigenous people did not fit into that society. So white settlers began finding ways to force Indigenous people to become assimilated into Canada’s burgeoning colonial society. Through Catholic orphanages and residential schools, colonizers began housing, educating, and Christianizing young Indigenous children—many of whom were abandoned by parents who couldn’t care for them (due to poverty induced by colonization). Other parents sent their children to residential schools in the hope that receiving an English education would better equip them to survive in colonial society.
White colonizers created an exclusionary society in which Indigenous people couldn’t hope to participate or keep up (because of racism, wealth gaps, and other social byproducts of colonization). Rather than make space for Indigenous people in white society, colonizers decided to find ways to fold Indigenous people into a new colonial social order—and the process of cultural genocide began. The residential schools, introduced here as a term for the first time, were one of the most egregiously violent and cruel colonial structures white Canadians created. The schools would become major sources of trauma and suffering for Indigenous people across Canada. The experience of forced assimilation, physical violence, and cultural erasure became the norm for many Indigenous people.
Themes
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, too, regularly “rounded up” Indigenous children from reserves and communities and delivered them to these institutions. Because many Indigenous children arrived at these schools against their will, many of them tried to run away—but Mounties were always assigned to catch them and bring them back by force.
Some Indigenous children entered the residential schooling system when their parents couldn’t care for them, or when their parents were forced to figure out ways to try to protect their children from the pain of being an outsider in the newly dominant white Canadian social order. But as this section of Seven Fallen Feathers shows, many of the Indigenous children who entered the residential school system were violently forced to do so. While the schools may have been sometimes described as being beneficial for Indigenous people—as being a road to success in Canadian society—this forced school attendance gives the lie to any such idea. The schools were created to destroy Indigenous culture by forcibly removing and reeducating Indigenous youth. The logic of colonization is leads to efforts to erase the traditions and cultures that threaten its dominance.
Themes
In 1966, St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School was demolished. Since the school’s inception in the early 1900s, six students had lost their lives there, and 16 more are still unaccounted for to this day. Now, a new Catholic elementary school sits on the grounds—no plaque or monument was added to the site until 2017. Indigenous people in Thunder Bay and across Canada commemorate the survivors of Canada’s residential schools on Orange Shirt Day, September 30.
This passage shows that the majority of the work that’s been done to try to make sense of the residential schooling system (and the cultural genocide it enabled) has been done by Indigenous people themselves. In contrast, Canadian society has never really atoned for its cruelty and violence—and Indigenous people have been left alone, once again, to pick up the pieces of their diminished cultural and spiritual traditions.
Themes
Seven Indigenous students who lost their lives in Thunder Bay in the early 2000s are the subject of this book—but to understand their stories, Talaga says, one must understand Thunder Bay’s past. In the city’s early days, seeds of division and ignorance were sown—and decades of apathy toward Canada’s Indigenous population have allowed those seeds to grow. As Nanabijou slept, the “white face of prosperity” flourished, while the “red face” was forced to stand and watch, powerless and ignored.
Here, Talaga highlights the importance of understanding cultural division and generational trauma in order to make sense of the violence that’s being perpetrated against Indigenous Canadians in the present day. Without a rigorous understanding of the generations of colonial violence that define Canada’s foundation, Talaga argues, one can’t comprehend the patterns of suffering, powerlessness, and vulnerability that marks so much of the contemporary Indigenous Canadian experience. In this way, Talaga refuses to let Indigenous people be blamed for the issues they continue to face in Canada. Any such issues, Talaga makes clear, are a legacy of Canada’s colonialist and racist past treatment of Indigenous people.
Themes
