Tanya Talaga’s award-winning Seven Fallen Feathers, a heart-rending account of the tragic deaths of seven Indigenous teenagers in Thunder Bay- five by drowning, one from alcohol poisoning and one who mysteriously collapsed and died on his kitchen floor- all deaths connected with severe alcohol intake- is a book that professes to deliver “hard truths” about the various manifestations of the “systemic racism” there, and in Canada generally, that according to her is the fundamental cause of these deaths.
It does nothing of the sort.
Instead, it avoids all the hard truths underlying these deaths- the hard truths that it is the benignly racist reserve system and the otherwise apartheid-like “separate but equal” Indigenous- non-Indigenous legal and social reality in Canada- and all the horrendous and intractable social dysfunction that results from this- that are the real fundamental causes of these deaths.
These kids were all from remote fly-in reserves in North Western Ontario, sent by their parents to Thunder Bay to attend the Indigenous-owned and operated Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, (which the book unintentionally shows to be a prime example of the hopeless, harmful unreality of Indian elites operating their own, Indians-only school system.)
Ms. Talaga skillfully describes why their parents, (or in many cases parent– two parent families are rare on these reserves), did that- to give their kids a chance in life where the reserve offered them none.
The picture of reserve life she sets out- rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual abuse, violence, primitive living conditions, marital and family dysfunction, mental illness, anxiety, unresolved grief and almost total unemployment, is chilling and shocking- totally unamenable to remedy by money. The youth there are experiencing “the highest suicide rate in the Western world”! Five hundred suicides between 1986 and 2016! The dropout rate at the poorly-equipped and maintained reserves schools is over 75%!
Regarding one reserve, Pikangikum, (where two twelve year-old native children burnt their new school down), she writes:
Intergenerational trauma from residential school experience is entrenched in Pikangikum. One hundred years of social exclusion, racism and colonialism has manifested itself as addiction, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and lack of knowledge on how to parent a child. Few of the kids discuss the sexual abuse they’ve suffered, yet more than 80 per cent of the children and youth in Indigenous residential treatment centres come from homes where they were sexually abused.
No wonder these parents- or more usually their one competent parent- wants them out of there!
So these kids- barely literate, barely educated or socialized in any conventional sense of those words, with no experience of anonymous, indifferent, lonely urban life whatever- are sent to Thunder Bay, to be boarded at homes of what appear to be mainly Indigenous persons, to attend the Indigenous-run high school.
And there, as the book amply and tragically shows, the hopeless dysfunctionality that characterized these kids reserve life before, continued, but in more toxic and deadly form.
The boarding homes the kids ended up in were all screened and approved by the Northern Nishnawbe Education Council (NNEC), funded by the Canadian taxpayer. The boarding hosts, all paid as well by the Canadian taxpayer, were supposedly trained and given supervisory rules and duties to follow. Despite this it clearly appears from Seven Fallen Feathers that many of the boarding hosts were either incompetent or indifferent towards the guardianship-like duties they owed their charges. These poor, lost kids were allowed to come and go as they pleased. They frequently skipped school. There was a complete lack of supervision.
All the kids who died, and it seems, every Indigenous kid who gets sent to the Cromarty school, almost as soon as they arrive in town, hook up with other Indigenous kids and immediately launch into a basically-unsupervised life style of drugs, pizza, violence (usually Indian on Indian), random, casual sex, the shopping mall, aimless and useless “hanging out”, and, most damaging and persistently, binge alcohol drinking. The amount of alcohol these kids are depicted as drinking is appalling. One of the girls who died drank a whole 40-ouncer of alcohol the day she died!
All this fatal chaos!
So who’s to blame for all this, and what’s the solution?
Here’s where Ms. Talaga’s book descends to the incompetent and irresponsible.
Instead of blaming the existence of the reserve system and all it stands for, which she and the rest of the Indian Industry she is a part of disgracefully want to keep,in one fantasy, “nation to nation” form or another, she blames the “colonialists”, the “white face”, (of which she is one! -she describes herself as Indigenous/Anishinaabe, but her father is Polish-Canadian! -only her mother is Ojibway, and she has spent almost her whole life in Toronto!), who, in a classic example of intellectually infantile, dehumanizing, racist stereotyping, she describes as follows:
The white face is the face of business and commerce and the rule of law. It wears button-down shirts, eats at the Keg, and lives in a cookie-cutter house in a brand-new subdivision with a Kia parked in the driveway. The people who live there are the doctors, the lawyers, and the proprietors of the twin city. On Saturdays they zip around in their cars to the big-box stores on the way to their cottages, or “camps”, so they can play with their powerboats and Jet Skis.” (sic, sick)
In addition to the offensiveness of the immediately above, (not to mention the insult to her “white face” father), it is also richly ironic. In her next book, All Our Relations, a CBC Lectures roadshow-version of Seven Fallen Feathers, Ms. Talaga recounts her attendance in May, 2018 at a “First Nations-led conference called determiNATION”, (paid for by the Canadian taxpayer- I wanted to go but I felt it was too expensive), at the high-end Delta Hotel in Ottawa, “to imagine a future without the Indian Act,” (which brave new “nation to nation” future Canadian taxpayers would also finance.) She wrote:
The night before the summit began, Alvin (Fiddler) and I went for dinner with Chief Jonathon Solomon at a chain steakhouse restaurant across the street from the hotel. The place was packed with Indigenous people from across the country.
(I guess they were all “culturally appropriating”, no doubt ultimately at Canadian taxpayers’ expense, the “white face” Keg.)
Ms. Talaga blames the police for failing to properly investigate the deaths and for failing to properly communicate with the families of the missing or found-dead kids. (The latter a fair comment.)
She blames the coroners for mistakes or omissions.
She blames the Thunder Bay “white face” generally for their purported, systemically-racist “complicity in this dark chapter in Canada’s history,” but offers no details to substantiate this slander of an entire community- no facts to show that ordinary Thunder Bay residents could fairly be held in any way responsible for these deaths- for all this tragic, reserve system-caused social chaos- for the total absence of supervision by the Indigenous guardians of these kids- for the errors made in dealing with the sequelae of these tragic deaths.
Her misplaced focus on human errors committed following these deaths, and her total absence of focus on the real “hard truth” causes of them, is a tremendous journalistic failure.
Does she try at all to deal with the causes of these deaths?
Only a little, and in the shallowest and most cop-out way.
She mentions “the betrayal of the treaties” and “a disregard of treaty rights”, but gives no details and draws no connection between those stock, Indian industry, throwaway statements and the deaths. This is just incompetent, irresponsible, mentally lazy and merely propagandist journalism. If one is going to say something like that, demonstrate it with facts.
(Interestingly Ms. Talaga, in this book that is a purveyor of every victim cliché that dominates the public discussion of this profound issue, describes the Robinson treaties as one of the ways by which the “white face” “took” and “carved up” the Indigenous peoples’ land. She does not suggest that these treaties were really agreements whereby the Indigenous peoples agreed to “share” the land with “white face”. Obviously no Indigenous person she interviewed for the book said this, and it doesn’t seem to have come up at the Keg with Chiefs Fiddler and Solomon, offering support for my view that the Judge in the recent Restoule case was erroneous in finding that that was the intention of the Indian bands when they signed them. See my critique of the Restoule case at thereisnodifference.ca.)
Ms. Talaga approvingly quotes NNEC’s Toronto-based lawyers who shockingly, based on no evidence whatsoever, and in the face of clear evidence of the deaths most probably being alcohol-caused accidents, suggested that one of more of the kids were possibly murdered and that the Thunder Bay police were to be faulted for not being able to disprove this evidence-free assertion.
She approvingly quotes one of these lawyers asserting that “Canadian society set them up for failure as human beings” and that “they died of flat neglect.”
(No! “Canadian society” wants the reserve system ended and Indigenous peoples to become completely equal with the rest of us! But we are marginalized, ignored and, if need be, silenced, by the Indian Industry, of which these lawyers are a part. As I argue in There Is No Difference, it is Indigenous and non-Indigenous elites who, by perpetuating and extending the status quo, set up Indigenous youth for “failure as human beings” and are the ones guilty of “flat neglect.”)
She approvingly quotes one of these Toronto lawyers completely and baselessly maligning the administration of justice in Northern Ontario by saying that “rule of law does not operate in the north.” From my personal experience of practicing in the Courts of Northern Ontario for over 40 years I say that this is a completely false and irresponsible assertion!
She approvingly quotes one of these Toronto lawyers weirdly saying that “one of the forms racism takes in this city of Thunder Bay is that kids aren’t necessarily safe at night by the rivers.” (!?)
She simplistically states that Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) “willingly allowed Indigenous kids to fall victim to jurisdictional warfare”, referring to funding disputes between Canada and Ontario. She offered no proof for this irresponsible and reckless assertion of bad faith conduct on the part of federal civil servants.
Ms. Talaga’s kick-the-ball-down-the -road solution to all this is to pour more money into the status quo. No “fierce urgency of now” for her! Just more money for more new policies and programs , (and in the meantime, the situation on the ground staying the same, the suicides continue.) In There Is No Difference I quote an INAC civil servant admitting that they’ve been pouring more and more money into the situation “for the past 40 years and we have no evidence that it’s working.” More money here means simply bandaging over the cancer.
To define this humanitarian crisis as fundamentally a lack of funding issue, Ms. Talaga and the Indian Industry are allowed to blame others, and thus deflect attention away from the “hard truths” which they, sometimes out of self-interest, are loath to confront. Again, hard truths such as:
-the existence of the Indian Act, which one former chief, Isadore Day, called “legislative racism”;
-the very existence of the reserves themselves;
-the “separate but equal”, apartheid-like legal and social reality we are all burdened with in Canada;
-the self-interest and failures of the chiefs and other Indigenous persons and organizations, such as NNEC, who profit from the status quo;
-the total absence on the part of the Indigenous actors in these tragedies of an acceptance of partial, personal responsibility for these deaths;
-the total absence on the part of these Indigenous actors that they personally must change, that they must sacrifice, that their people must change and sacrifice. It’s not-it can’t be– all the fault of the “white face”;
-the self-interest of the Indian Industry;
-the self-interest, incompetence, irresponsibility and otherwise of Canada’s non-Indigenous elites, in eschewing one of Western Civilization’s core values and goals- full equality under the law for all citizens of a country– in favour of Canada’s benignly racist and race-based Indigenous status quo;
-the moral smugness, passivity, futility and close-mindedness inherent in the cult of permanent victimhood;
-the existence of racially segregated schools like Dennis Franklin Cromarty;
-NNEC and the boarding hosts’ failure to supervise these kids;
-the obsession with race and the racist fantasy of distinct “blood” in this whole Indigenous situation;
-generally, the best interests of these vulnerable kids being sacrificed by our prosperous and comfortable Indigenous and non-Indigenous elites in favour of the status quo.
J’accuse!
Seven Fallen Feathers embodies all of the above failures and omissions.
It is demoralizing to think that Seven Fallen Feathers has won prizes and is regarded as positively contributing to the solution of the tragic problem of Canada’s first peoples and their proper place in modern, 21st century, racially-indifferent, mainstream society.
The real message of Seven Fallen Feathers is that those kids who died, and all the rest of our Indigenous children in similar circumstances, have been forsaken by, and they deserve much better from, Canada’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous elites.
Peter Best, Sudbury, January 22th, 2019
