Seven Fallen Feathers is Tanya Talaga’s first book, published back in 2017, and was recommended to me. It is about the systemic racism against Indigenous people in Canada and has managed to upset me more than The Knowing did.

Talaga was writing a story about why more Indigenous people were not voting in the 2011 federal election in Canada when her attention was redirected to the deaths of seven Indigenous high school students in Thunder Bay, Ontario, between the years 2000 to 2011. The bodies of five of the seven fallen feathers were found in the rivers around Thunder Bay, and the Thunder Bay police did not even bother investigating each death before deeming each one an accident. But seven deaths with no investigations in a racist shithole of a city where Indigenous people are regularly harassed by the white population is pretty sus, so Talaga began her own investigation.

Seven Fallen Feathers educates the reader on the lives of the Indigenous peoples who live in northern Ontario. They live on remote reservations that are mainly accessible only by plane and that do not have adequate housing, running water and electricity. It is incredibly infuriating that the Canadian government will send billions of dollars of aid to other countries instead of making sure that all Canadians, especially the Indigenous ones, experience a certain standard of living that includes access to indoor plumbing and a reliable electrical grid.

In addition, these remote reservations do not have adequate schooling. If an Indigenous teenager living on a remote reservation wants to complete his or her education, then he or she must move hundreds of kilometers away from home to go to high school, and it is understandable with the history of residential schools in Canada that the parents of these teenagers are reluctant to send them away to school.

Six of the seven fallen feathers attended Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School (DFC) in Thunder Bay, which is run by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC). The students who attend DFC are expected to board. Some are lucky enough to board with relatives who lived in Thunder Bay, others must board with strangers. In addition to the complete culture shock of moving to a large city after growing up on an isolated reservation, the students experience overt racism from the white residents of Thunder Bay. I’m talking about having literal garbage thrown at them from people in passing cars who are also yelling racial slurs at them. It is not easy for them to leave the comfort of their familial homes for a place that is hostile towards them, so many of the students turn to drinking as a crutch for socialization, and all seven fallen feathers were drinking on the nights that they died.

I initially felt that some of the blame for what happened to the seven fallen feathers should fall on the NNEC, but as Talaga points out, the NNEC was doing the best it could while having no experience running a high school, and it was set up for failure because it had no support from the Canadian government. The Canadian government has just washed its hands of the “Indigenous problem” and does jack shit to help Indigenous people succeed in this country.

I found Seven Fallen Feathers a little difficult to follow because of the many people mentioned in the book and because the stories of the seven fallen feathers are all tragically similar, but it is a good book that has affected me deeply.