Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

  I often think about the role of statistics in inciting people to feel sympathy and take action. The anonymity of numbers, unfortunately, disguises the profoundly horror of some aspects of human existence. It often feels like hundreds or thousands of people die and are absorbed into their status as a statistic. If we know someone, though, how can we quantify the loss of them? Such sorrow is impossible to fathom.

I also think about a line from the poem “Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich that reads, in part, “she would recognize that poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come.” I wonder about that, too. Do words actually incite change? It feels increasingly unlikely as we see unquantifiable amounts of ink spilled to fight against politicians that daily make the world a worse place and seem undeterred by the looming ridicule on their epitaphs.

Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers is the same kind of knowing: a humanizing knowing. For years, this book was required reading for teenagers and teachers studying Indigenous issues—with good reason. It’s informative with respect to issues that came up in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, including the horrors of residential schools, the dismantling of families through biased adoption practices, the failures of law enforcement and legal proceedings, and so forth. The book is specifically focused, though, on telling the stories of real people. Talaga offers a thorough account of the tragic deaths of Indigenous students in Thunder Bay. The victims, though, are actually humanized in a way rare to nonfiction. Beyond just telling us their names, means of death, culprits responsible, and so forth, we get a sense of their interests, their friendships, their passions.

In turn, Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that inspires us to see things differently, to see abstract issues as tangible. It’s the kind of book that inspires a revolution in thinking and proves instructive in empathy. There are moments of such profound devastation that the idea of blindly accepting injustices becomes beyond ludicrous. The deaths of the children feel personal, and Talaga’s account of the suicide attempts of an adult who cared for these students and lost everything else wring the heart at every level.

Talaga’s gifts as a writer carry the stories to a new level of resonance. She is journalistic in nature, but offers a narrative spin. Seven Fallen Feathers reads almost novelistically. The pacing of the events feels carefully crafted around story beats and the characterization of real people is wrought in fine detail. The language of the book is given such care and it reads beautifully. It has the engaging tone of a true crime podcast, but deals with systemic issues and maintains a deep focus on the people most deeply affected.

The book is compelling in every regard. It shows compassion for the community, offers a critical eye to systems that reinforce injustice, and provides the young people who lost their lives with the dignity and respect that they deserve. From a narrative standpoint, the book works. From a nonfiction informative standpoint, the book works. As a political act, the book works.

Now let’s do the work. Happy reading.

The Punishment by Joseph Dandurand

Back in December, I was in Whistler B.C. and stumbled across Joseph Dandurand’s collection of poems, The Punishment, and was immediately engaged by its cover art. At the time I picked it up, I was thoroughly entrenched in an additional qualifications course about First Nations, Indigenous, and Métis cultures. I didn’t feel up to the task of taking on additional related reading over and above my studies (Dandurand is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation), but after some time passed, The Punishment called to me from my unread shelf and it was, as expected, pretty darn heavy.

The Punishment is a collection of poems written with clear and accessible language, many in a narrative form in the register of fables or Indigenous stories. The poems address the traumas of colonialism head-on, and going through the collection provides an intimate portrait of the artist’s life. The poems address the legacy of residential schools, given that his mother was in one and has religious trauma that is passed along to Dandurand and exacerbated by his time at Catholic school. Incidentally, several of the poems address Dandurand’s experiences being bullied and getting into fights at school. Some of the poems address his teenage and adult years, specifically in his experience with addiction and mental illness, including time spent in an institution. In the final section of the collection, there are more poems about Dandurand’s writing career and his family life, raising two children and losing his ex to an overdose. As I said, pretty darn heavy.

I think it’s pretty common for people with significant trauma to return to the sources of their pain as an attempt to process and move forward. As a personal project, then, I hope The Punishment helps to engage in the act of healing. As an aesthetic project—at the risk of sounding unkind—I think The Punishment needed some editing. The collection is just under 150 pages, which is somewhat long for a poetry collection as is, and I felt that the subject matter got a little repetitive. There’s a fine balance that’s hard to pinpoint—poets often deal with the same themes over and over, but when specific anecdotes are repeated it seems like a missed opportunity to cull to the most effective poems.

That being said, there are some dimensions that I thought were particularly compelling. For instance, there were poems about residential schools, but the real drama is in their legacy. One poem recounts an arson at a Church, which was both contemporaneous and a finely wrought narrative scene. A few of the poems address Dandurand’s mother’s experience at residential school, which is painful enough to witness, but the depiction of intergenerational trauma is what is most powerful. Dandurand’s mother clearly had an awful experience at the schools but nonetheless grows to love the Lord and pushes her young son to accept God, too. It’s such an interesting tension between having compassion for her and being incensed at her treatment of her son, and the way Dandurand constructs the situation across multiple poems is excellent.

My favourite moment in the collection, bar none, comes in the poem “Sinking In.” The build-up to the moment is a direct address to those who, like me, dare to paraphrase other peoples’ stories. He writes, “When I walk away, do not stare at me / to turn and tell differently the words / that I have carried on my back since I was five” (29). The line is appropriate to the moment recounted in anecdote, but also seems to stand in for all victims of abuse, especially Indigenous victims of abuse, whose stories are recycled by White audiences like myself. What am I doing? Rather than sharing the words as they are written, I am summarizing and commenting and inserting myself where I don’t belong. Setting the politics of that aside for a second, the passage I just quoted continues with a brilliantly constructed line break: “that I have carried on my back since I was five / and the first cold touch of a priest destroyed me / into the man I am today” (29). Ending the line about the priest on the words “destroyed me” encompasses a whole world, but the addition of “destroyed me / into the man I am today” is great inversal of how we normally think of our identities. We are made into the men we are; to frame that as a destruction is replete with layers of thoughtfulness. It implies so much in just a few words, reversing our usual thinking that we progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood. That one phrase makes the collection. 

In examining the long-term effects of childhood trauma, Dandurand’s poem “The Parade” provides a narrativized experience of life in an institution. He narrates how they are provided with cotton slippers and lose them. The painting of the inmates is not at all flattering; it paints them as drooling and slipperless and yet provides them with the human dignity we are all afforded: “we all are, yes, / we are all worth saving in one way or another” (102). Dandurand looks at the parade of medicated people and recognizes that he will eventually join their ranks. One of the stanzas offers an interesting inversion, dozens of pages later, to the idea of being “destroyed” into the man he is today. It begins with a doctor advising Dandurand to stay a while longer, take his meds, and offers him the chance to “become the man / with those around me giving me cigarettes” (103). There’s a selfless devotion while he remains a higher status than the other patients: “I will fix / any problem or person for them and soon I’ve been there / for six months when the doctor finally says I should go ho / home now and that they’ve become concerned / that even the nurses fear me” (103). He is offered the chance at rehabilitation and devotes himself to others, though the nurses still fear him for his fighting with other patients. Dandurand balances the theme so beautifully that people are worth saving while still being flawed—it comes out in different forms, which provides the collection some rich layering. It is clear that his institutionalization is not as helpful as one would hope, and there’s a kind of resignation when Dandurand is provided with a pair of shoes—this time to leave. Dandurand imagines the “parade” the new patient “will soon be joining / with all the gods of the place walking and talking / the truth, as if the truth mattered” (103). It’s a powerful final line, precisely because of its cynicism that any person’s truth is taken seriously by those who are supposed to help.

Ironically, The Punishment offers some harsh truths about history, about identity, about wellness—hopefully truths that we take seriously. The overall project is effective, if repetitive, in working through some of the nuances attached to experiences, especially related to Indigenous trauma. It’s by no means an uplifting text, though there are moments of joy, but it is one of resilience: it is survival on display. Despite tragedy, despite loss, despite grief: we persevere.

With that in mind, happy reading!