In September 1874, during the negotiations that led to Treaty 4, the treaty between First Nations and the Crown that covers southern Saskatchewan and parts of southeastern Alberta and southwestern Manitoba, kamooses, one of the Plains Cree or nêhiyaw Chiefs who was speaking on behalf of his people, asked the federal treaty commissioners this haunting question: “Is it true that my child will not be troubled for what you are bringing him?”
I thought about that question, and the promises in the treaties that schools would be provided so that, in the words of Treaty Commissioner Alexander Morris, First Nations might “learn the cunning of the white man,” as I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City. It’s not a new book–it was published in 2018–and yet it remains important. It won or was shortlisted for a slew of awards, and it deserved to; it presents an account of how Canada has consistently refused to take seriously its obligations to provide First Nations children with an education comparable to the one settler children receive. Instead, we have engaged in active genocide, through residential schools, or malign neglect, as Talaga describes in this book.
Why malign neglect? The young people Talaga writes about, students as Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario, would rather have studied at schools in their communities. The federal government, however, will not fund high schools in First Nations communities in northern Ontario. That’s not surprising; it won’t fund clean drinking water or proper sewage disposal, either. So young people who want to go to school beyond Grade 8 move hundreds of kilometres from their families to board with people who are often strangers and attend a First Nations-run high school in a converted office building in a big city. Some of those young people have never been south before, have never seen traffic lights, don’t know what to do when they get onto a city bus. The school, which is supposed to look after them, is under-resourced. Many of the young people aren’t fluent in English; instead, they speak Oji-Cree or Anishinabemowin. Many carry the burden of intergenerational residential-school trauma with them.
And, like young people anywhere, they like to party. A little alcohol, or a lot, makes them feel less awkward, more social. Hands up if your experience at parties in high school was like that. They gather to party in parks along the rivers that flow through Thunder Bay into Lake Superior. Sometimes–too often–they disappear into the cold, fast waters of the Kaministiquia or McIntyre. Their bodies are found, eventually. Talaga’s book considers seven lives, seven deaths, but it’s clear they represent only a partial sample.
The malign neglect isn’t just in our refusal to fund First Nations education adequately. It goes beyond the federal government into the Thunder Bay Police Services, which decides no foul play has taken place when yet another First Nations youth is pulled out of a river without bothering to conduct an investigation, and into the Province of Ontario’s coroners, who can’t be bothered to contact families when their children die, which they are required to do by law, or show up on the scene of an unattended death. If white kids were drowning like this, something would be done. But since the bodies are Indigenous, only First Nations people seem to care.
Talaga suggests, at the end of the book, that these deaths aren’t examples of drunken misadventure–that some First Nations teens have survived being assaulted, beaten, and thrown into the water by gangs of white men uttering racist taunts. But she can’t go beyond suggestion, because there’s no evidence, and there’s no evidence because the police don’t take seriously their responsibility to investigate these deaths. The malevolent racism behind their collective shrug is astonishing. They just don’t care.
Talaga’s prose is spare. She talks to people in communities across northwestern Ontario. She connects these deaths to residential schools, to the 60s Scoop, to other assaults on First Nations children and families committed by Canada. Her anger (as you can probably tell) is infectious. We settlers need to do a lot better, collectively, all of us. And our federal government needs to take its responsibilities seriously, to stop fighting Indigenous Peoples in court, to realize that the word “reconciliation” will only take shape in actions, to fund schools, to stop jamming resource development down the throats of communities where you can’t drink the water that comes out of the tap. The treaties we made? They bring obligations with them, responsibilities we settlers need to acknowledge and live up to.