At the beginning of Seven Fallen Feathers, author Tanya Talaga cites a report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that defines “cultural genocide” as “the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group.” By destroying a cultural, ethnic, or religious group’s institutions, seizing their land and artifacts, or barring their languages and traditions, a colonizing force can effectively destroy a colonized group of people. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created to address the cultural genocide that white Canadian settlers committed against Indigenous Canadians for centuries. As Talaga explores the deaths of seven Indigenous students (the titular “seven fallen feathers”) in the Canadian city of Thunder Bay in the early 21st century, she argues that colonialism and cultural genocide aren’t relegated to the past. Rather, they’re ongoing processes that continue to harm Indigenous Canadians by diminishing their cultures and identities—and even putting their lives at risk.
First, Talaga examines Canada’s long history of cultural genocide to show how the white settlers and Canadian government’s policies toward Indigenous people were centered on destruction and colonization. Indigenous people were coerced into signing exploitative treaties with the white English and French settlers who sought to take their land. Agreements such as the Robinson-Superior Treaty, signed in 1850, forced Indigenous people to move onto reservations far from their sources of food, water, community, and commerce. White settlers took the best, most fertile land for themselves, depriving Indigenous people of their own resources “so that the nation of Canada could be formed.” Canadian settlers also wanted to ensure that Indigenous people wouldn’t threaten the developing colonial economy or social order. So, the Canadian government introduced legislation such as the Indian Act in 1876, which sought to systematically destroy Indigenous culture by barring Indigenous religious ceremonies, languages, and political structures. Talaga further argues that because the Canadian government never invested in learning more about the Indigenous people it was colonizing—preferring to ignore and erase the cultures and traditions of the land being settled—white Canadians essentially “built [their] own society” and ignored the struggles they’d created for Indigenous communities, as Indigenous people “powerlessly stood and watched.”
Next, Talaga shows how colonialism and cultural genocide continue to define Indigenous life in Canada. Even though the Government of Canada has, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, sought to make amends for the injustice that took place under colonialism, the damage of the past endures. Contemporary Indigenous communities remain restricted and devastated by past legislation. For example, while no act exists today to physically confine Indigenous people to their reservations, the “oppressive weight” of generational poverty and racist violence (which have historical roots in the way colonists treated the Indigenous population) mean that a lot of Indigenous people are essentially tied to their reservations anyway. While cultural traditions continue and families remain tight-knit on reservations, a lack of funding rooted in the unfair treaties of the past means that reservations often lack basic necessities, like running water and reliable electricity. Schools and community centers on Indigenous reservations—if they exist at all—are often in disrepair. And there are few grocery stores on or near reservations, meaning that Indigenous people face malnutrition and exorbitant prices for food. When Indigenous people do leave the reservations in pursuit of education—as all of the “seven fallen feathers” did—they often face racism and violence. Cities like Thunder Bay, for example, are hotbeds of hate crimes. The cultural legacy of colonialism and cultural genocide still influence Canadian society—Talaga makes clear that many white Canadians see Indigenous people as “dirty” and “unworthy” of having access to spaces that colonial settlers made into traditionally white ones.
Lastly, Talaga explains that colonialism and cultural genocide continue to threaten Indigenous Canadians’ health and autonomy. Indigenous people continue to struggle daily against outdated policies, poverty, and pervasive racism, problems that are historically rooted in the way Canada’s original white settlers treated the Indigenous population. So, while Canada may have eradicated official restrictions on how Indigenous people can live—both inside and outside their own communities—unofficial limitations remain on what Indigenous Canadians can achieve. Indigenous Canadians experience unequal access to health services, educational resources, and career opportunities compared to white Canadians. These lacks mean that Indigenous people are at a disproportionately high risk of health problems, and they have few avenues to pursue their goals and better their circumstances. And as long as the Government of Canada continues to ignore the “seeds” of structural racism and cultural genocide that were planted long ago, Talaga argues that nothing good or new can grow in Canadian society. Talaga suggests that in order to truly begin healing the wounds of the past, Canada must invest in a new approach to reckoning with the “seeds” planted long ago. Rather than ignore them or continue to “nourish” them with neglect, the Canadian government and descendants of colonials must actively work to plant new seeds of truth and reconciliation.
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Colonialism, Cultural Genocide, and Racism Quotes in Seven Fallen Feathers
The Kam still draws people to its shores. Teens come down to the river's gummy banks to take cover under bridges or in bushes to drink and party. Here they have privacy, a space of their own, beside the giant pulp and paper mill that spews smelly, yellow, funnel-shaped clouds into the air. Here they are close to nature. They sit on the rocks and listen to the rush of the water, and they are reminded of home.
To understand the stories of the seven lost students who are the subjects of this book, the seven "fallen feathers," you must understand Thunder Bay's past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distaste, 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. And you must understand how the government of Canada has historically underfunded education and health services for Indigenous children, providing consistently lower levels of support than for non-Indigenous kids, and how it continues to do so to this day. The white face of prosperity built its own society as the red face powerlessly stood and watched.
By the time of the seventh fire, young people would rise up and begin to follow the trails of the past, seeking help from the Elders, but many of the Elders would have fallen asleep or be otherwise unable to help. The young would have to find their own way, and if they were successful there would be a rebirth of the Anishinaabe nation. But if they were to fail, all would fail.
When Stan talked about losing his son, the pain of the lost seven was closely tied to him. The loss of Daniel and the loss of the seven represented the loss of hope, the failure of one generation to take care of the next.
It is vital that people understand how the utter failure and betrayal of the treaties […] worked in conjunction with a paternalistic piece of legislation called the Indian Act to isolate Indigenous people on remote reservations and to keep them subservient to Ottawa for more than one hundred years.
If every Indigenous child was absorbed into Canadian society, their ties to their language and their culture would be broken. They wouldn't live on reserve lands; they'd live and work among other Canadians and there would no longer be a need for treaties, reserves, or special rights given to Indigenous people. The single purpose, and simple truth, of the residential school system was that it was an act of cultural genocide. If the government of Canada managed to assimilate all Indigenous kids, it would no longer have any financial or legal obligations to Indigenous people.
For the next decade, the children continued to be abused at the school, but now they were far away from home. By the 1940s and 1950s, the government knew the residential school system was an absolute disaster. The Indigenous people were not seamlessly assimilating into Canadian culture and society; in fact, they were actively resisting assimilation.
Regardless, from the 1940s until 1952, Canadian scientists across the country worked with bureaucrats—who were in charge of the care of Indigenous children—and top nutrition experts on what have become notoriously known as starvation experiments using students at six residential schools as their subjects.
What the statistics don't tell you is how some of the older children would form their own abusive circles, preying on the younger, more vulnerable kids. The abuse suffered at the hands of adult supervisors took its toll on the students. They became further disengaged from the classroom, angry, and in need of someone to take their rage out on. For some of these kids, the younger children were easy victims.
This is the life Chanie ran from.
"When I am alone at home, I think about my brother. The drive to go home was so strong. I don’t want his death to be in vain[.] […] As a residential school survivor, you can feel it all over again, what these students felt. Yes, you can feel it."
Parents sent their children to DFC by choice. It is not a residential school. It is not run by the church, nor is it strictly regulated by Indigenous and Northern Affairs. It is an Indigenous-run private school. But the only other choice parents had was to abandon their children's high school education or pick up and move to a city.
The one problem the educators couldn’t foresee was that every single one of those children brought the ghosts of the past with them. Some of the kids were leaving an idyllic family life, but most were not. Many came from homes touched by the horrific trauma of residential school—abuse, addictions, extreme poverty, and confused minds.
Police did not start a missing persons investigation until six days after Jethro's disappearance.
Dora continued to call the police to check on any leads, and each time she was treated like a nuisance. "Right away, every time I called there, I got used to somebody answering the phone and hearing, 'There are no leads,' or other comments like, 'He is just out there partying.’”
Dora remembers looking at Jethro and thinking that he didn't look as bad as the director had made out. But when she looked more closely, she saw a three-inch-wide gash, starting from the top of his forehead and ending at the middle of his head. There were round contusions on his cheek. She immediately thought it looked like someone had extinguished their burning cigarette butts on his face.
She checked his tummy. It wasn't bloated. She looked at his hands, which weren't purple or blown up with water.
Dora took in a sharp breath. She knew she was right: This was no accident.
An undercurrent of racism runs through Thunder Bay society. It can be subtle and insidious but it can also be in your face. Ask any Indigenous high school students in Thunder Bay if they have experienced racism and they'll undoubtedly tell you about racial slurs and garbage or rotten eggs being thrown at them from passing cars. Others have been hit on the back of the head with beer bottles by unknown groups of assailants, who leave them bleeding on the side of the road.
Curran Strang's body was found in the Mclntyre River on September 26, 2005. The Ontario Coroner's Office officially listed his death as accidental, having determined the cause of death was by drowning. Authorities believe he decided to head into the water, alone, on a cold September night. Just like Jethro Anderson, who was afraid of the water.
There is absolutely no evidence that either Jethro or Curran ended up in the river of their own accord.
Maryanne is left wondering what happened to Paul, just like she has been left wondering what happened to Sarah. Maryanne has had to live with the crushing emptiness of having two of the most important people in her life taken from her without any explanation why. Living in this state makes it nearly impossible for Maryanne to find peace; she is constantly looking for answers. And after she has exhausted all possibilities, she is left hollow.
When he got to the river's edge, Ricki carefully squatted down, resting on his heels. He spent some time thinking before he slowly stretched his arms out over the water, his palms gently skimming the surface. Then he put his hands in the river, his arms spread out as far as possible. His body began to shudder.
It was as if he were reaching out for his brother.
The police were touched into silence. They backed away, giving the boy the time he needed before taking him back to the station.
Alvin thought about the abject poverty most of his people lived in and the addictions they suffered in the hopes of making all their misery go away.
Alvin thought about their parents, even his own older brothers and sisters, who had gone to residential school before his family moved to Muskrat Dam. And he thought about the forced schooling of more than 150,000 Indigenous kids and what it had done to the psyche of the people and the impact it had had on the next generation and the next.
And then he thought about the five dead students there in Thunder Bay. A direct line of causation could be drawn from the residential school legacy to the failings in the government-run education system his people were left with.
And yet still the inequities rage. Northern First Nations families are faced with the horrific choice of either sending their children to high school in a community that cannot guarantee their safety, or keeping them at home and hoping distance education will be enough. Families are still being told—more than twenty years after the last residential school was shut down—that they must surrender their children for them to gain an education. Handing over the reins to Indigenous education authorities such as the NNEC without giving them the proper funding tools is another form of colonial control and racism.
After the attack on Darryl Kakekayash, Alvin and Julian saw a clear and disturbing pattern. They could not help but wonder if First Nations kids were being targeted and murdered. It was extremely rare to hear of Indigenous kids drowning on their reserves. Most First Nations people were born and raised on the water. Equally perplexing was how quickly the Thunder Bay Police wrote off investigations into the deaths. For Jethro, Curran, Reggie, and Kyle, police had issued press releases that came to the same conclusion: foul play was not suspected. Each of the deaths was classified as accidental: death by drinking too much and then drowning. To Thunder Bay Police, no one was readily responsible for the deaths of the students.
Iacobucci wrote that Indigenous people told him there was a fundamental conflict between their cultural values, laws, and ideologies of traditional approaches to conflict resolution and the values and laws that underpin the Canadian justice system. Indigenous people wanted to re-attain harmony and balance—they wanted truth rather than retribution or punishment, he said.
The court system had assigned one of the largest, most complex inquests in Ontario’s history to one of the smallest rooms in the building. […] The room allocation was […] a slap in the face to the parents who had waited years for the formal investigation into their children’s deaths to begin.
Outraged and insulted, Achneepineskum, Falconer, and NAN staff began moving chairs from other courtrooms and the lobby and jamming them into the tiny box they were allocated.
To the families, this scheduling gaffe was indicative of how the cases of the seven students were handled by authorities from the very start. Real life became a metaphor for how they had always been treated […] by the Canadian justice system.
[Christian] called the painting Seven Fallen Feathers. Each feather represents one of the seven dead students. Morrisseau was tired of hearing them being called that, "Seven dead students." People always referred to the kids like that. "The seven dead." As if they weren't anything else in life.
They had their own spirits. They were their own people.
Morrisseau couldn’t stand hearing his son Kyle being called "one of the seven dead students" anymore, not by the news media, not by the lawyers, not by the people who meant well but found it easier to lump them all together as one.
Kyle was a fallen feather. They all were.
The Canada Day holiday approaches and the country prepares to celebrate its 150th birthday on July 1; for Alvin it will be a day of reflection. He will be at a powwow […] with his family. He will be standing in a circle with all the nations surrounding him in ceremonial dance, and he will be thinking of the children before him decked out in their beautiful jingle dresses, their bright-coloured ribbons, and their feathers, and he will wonder about their future and what he can do to make sure they make it to the final prophecy—the eighth fire. Can the settlers and the Indigenous people come together as one and move forward in harmony?
